MAIL 3.4 TOTALLY UNRESPONSIVE

Question

My wife did something on my laptop and it wiped out all internet connections, including MAIL and actually even remove Mozilla Firefox. The only way that I could get any to work was to accept an update message to 10.5.4.
This seemed to reinstall Safari (which worked) and MAIL. I downloaded and installed a new Mozilla Firefox which also worked. Mail seemed to work - but NOT REALLY. It opens... but no windows appear. I can access my preference (and everything is intact with accounts established and the settings as before). But that is it. Nothing works, not New Message... nothing. I can open Window/Message Viewer - but it is just a weird blank window with a "little" black dot floating in center. I thought it was a buger on my screen, but I can actually touch it with mouse and slide it bck and forth horizontally. That's all I can do.
I can't even QUIT application. I have to force quit.
Anybody have any idea what's up? I've tried trashing the preferences, establishing new accounts, etc.. Same hangup results.
My wife thinks that what she says was a popup that she answered when on (but did not read) had something to do with Limewire - a peer to peer application that my kids installed and have been running for years. Problems ever since. Like I said, everything else back to normal - but this MAIL thing.

Answer 1

I am having a similar problem with 10.5.6 and the newest Mail app.
My IMAP accounts with the provider www.dotster.com, who seem to be using the open source 'Horde' as their server, seem to be working alright, but constantly give me the error message "The server error encountered was: The attempt to read data from the server “mail10.dotsterhost.com” failed." even though I can receive email without issue. In general preferences I attempted increasing the number of minutes in the "Check for new mail:" setting, though this doesn't make the error go away.
In reading other threads, it seems you might try deselecting the "Use IDLE command..." checkbox, though for me these are always greyed-out and checked by default. You might also need to ensure the "IMAP Path Prefix:" is set as "INBOX". Again, this is just what I've gleaned from other threads.