Lion mail behaving badly

Hi all,
I just got my wife a a Core i3, 3.06Ghz 21.5" iMac. I bumped it to 8MB of RAM as she never remembes to quit anything. I updated he to Lion after using it for a week and finding no problems on my machine. As of late Mail has started to behave very strangely. After responding to one or two e-mails without problem in the next e-mail she responds to the charachtersshe's typing apper on screen with more and more of a lag until she can be three or four lines ahead of the on screen text. The problem doesn't happen all the time and she can't, so far come up with a definite way of replicating it consistantly. The responses that have this problem also can be very slow to send, with the general "rainbow" spinning system cursor and not the gray spinning "working" icon spinning next to the mailbox, that you usually get when the ISP is being slow. This again is not consistant. I could not replicate either problem when I tried it. She has probably 30 smart mailboxes that she uses for student mail in her various teaching jobs, is using the "classic" setup. She is composing in "Rich Text" with the spell as I type feature turned on, is using Helvetica as the font but has changed to Times to eleiminate any weird font corruption problems. She never had a problem in 10.6 on her old iMac or on this one. She also ran mail on 10.7 for a week or so with no noticible problem.
Any ideas where to even start? I'm not familiar with Mails preference files and can't delete anything that will mess with her smart mailboxes, as losing them would be a disaster for her. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Some things to consider.
     Create another admin account and see if the same thing happens in that user account. If not, then you have a problem in the primary user account.
    I am assuming you zapped PRAM and did an SMC reset, plus unplugged all periphals for awhile.
   If the machine recently started acting this way, look at recent installs. If it has acted like this since you installed 10.7.2 you might reinstall using the combo update or install the 10.7.3 combo update.
You can also reinstall Lion and not lose your data.
Jay

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Some things to consider.
     Create another admin account and see if the same thing happens in that user account. If not, then you have a problem in the primary user account.
    I am assuming you zapped PRAM and did an SMC reset, plus unplugged all periphals for awhile.
   If the machine recently started acting this way, look at recent installs. If it has acted like this since you installed 10.7.2 you might reinstall using the combo update or install the 10.7.3 combo update.
You can also reinstall Lion and not lose your data.
Jay

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Hi all,
my mail account will not recieve mail but can send, when I hook up my old windows computer with the same mail settings the mail comes thru to that computer.
the mail has been working fine on the Mac but not now, I tried to send a large file it may be the cause ,who knows?
I have reinstalled 10.5 to no avail.
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Many thanks,
John
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Hi John,
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beethovengirl wrote:
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I am sure they will read it, but it's impossible to know whether they will take action. I would guess that having a large number of people ask for something increases the chances.
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Harry Heck wrote:
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Lion mail behaving badly

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