Error opening or saving certain attachements in Mail.app

I have encountered a problem with certain attachments in Mail.app. I couldn't find any solution on the Internets, but I eventually figured it out and thought I should post it here.
This has been a rare issue (only happened twice so far) and may be related to OmniGraffle files.
The problem: When clicking to open the attachment or trying to save the attachment, I got the error: Mail was unable to save the attachment “file.name” to disk. Please verify your downloads folder exists and is writable.
The solution:
1. I found the message in the mail folder.
2. I made a copy of it (just to be safe) and opened the copy in TextEdit.
3. Within that message, I found the following header marking the start of the offending file:
--Apple-Mail-4-912721465
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=file.extension.zip
Content-Type: application/zip;
x-mac-auto-archive=yes;
name="file.extension.zip"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
4. I changed both references to "file.extension.zip" to just "file.zip"
5. Save and double-click on the file to open it in Mail.app
6. Now the offending file should appear as a folder and you can open and save it. The file you really want access to is within this folder.
Notes: Both times my problem was with an OmniGraffle file. Maybe this is a clue, or maybe not. Also, I believe the problem has something to do with the file being zipped (or the way Mail.app handles .zip files), but have no proof!
I have no idea why this problem is occurring, but if anyone has anything to add, please do-- I'm posting here mainly to share a strange solution to a strange problem. The more info the better.

These permissions bugs in Lion are pretty prevalent and I've had to reset a lot of application defaults since migrating between machines. Do the following and let me know if it works:
Copy your Mail and Mail Downloads folders in ~/Library/ ( where "~" is referring to your User). Paste these folders your copied into something on your desktop as a back up.
Then navigate to ~/Library/Preferences and find the two .plist files named, "com.apple.mail.plist" and "com.apple.mail.plist.lockedfile" and delete them.
Relaunch Mail.
Relaunching should cause a new .plist file to generate that reads as defualt and using the contents of your ~/Library/Mail folder your OS X Mail shoudl look like it did.
I have issues changing prefs in mail and seem to have a bigger bug at work since I continually have to trash my mail.plist once a week or else I can't connect to my SMTP server. But this always works and I get rid of the, "...writing preferences to your disk has failed..." message.

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