Email is viewable only in Preview pane.

Question

My install of Snow Leopard last Monday went fine and I never experienced any of the Mail issues folks seem to be having. I was able to send and receive fine, my mailboxes and settings were all imported properly and all has been great until yesterday.
I usually just view my emails in the Preview pane, but yesterday I wanted to print one out so I double-clicked to open it in its own window and nothing happened. In the Message Viewer, the email in question went from a blue highlight to a gray highlight. And in the top Window menu, that email has a check mark next to it, but it is nowhere to be seen. I tried to print it, just to see if it would print something (it didn't). It's still showing up in my list of open windows, but without the check mark, and I can't remove it from the list. And I still can't see it anywhere.
I've Repaired Permissions, restarted, and rebuilt all my mailboxes, but now I don't know what else to do. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Don G. wrote:
No luck with Expose, either. Strange.
Also, I should mention that when this first started yesterday, I figured I'd just quit everything and restart. Well, I was unable to quit Mail. I had to Force Quit, Same thing happened after the restart. I got sidetracked for a while and was getting ready to leave the house, so I figured I'd try again and this time it quit without any problem. But this missing email window problem persists.
*Here's a little update*. I just tried to print an email again, even though it didn't appear in its own window. It took a good 30 seconds for the print window to display, and then I used Preview from the Print window and the mail showed up in the print preview. I was able to print it that way, but that was the only way I could see that email (other than Mail's preview pane).
Back in Mail, under the Window menu, the suspect mail still shows in the list. But it shows up without the checkmark, so Mail doesn't think it's open. This is confirmed by the fact that the "Close" menu item is grayed out and cmd-Q does nothing. Other emails I try to open don't show up, but at least I can get them out of the list in the Window menu.
I'm tempted to try dragging over the old preferences from the clone, unless you think that will really screw things up even more.
I would not do that. if you had a snow leopard backup then you could try that. as it is I suggest you try the following. copy the folder /users/username/library/mail AND the file /users/username/library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to the desktop. then delete /users/username/library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. then start Mail. you'll have to recreate your email accounts. once you do they should recognize their existing mailboxes. see if it works ok after that.