Mail 4.3 not working after installing combo

Question

I had problems with my mail after installing snow leopard and then having one failed software update. I then installed the combo. It seemed to successfully install the mail app and then When i opened it, it said to wait while my mailboxes were rebuilt... this was then "done".
after that however mail started to misbehave. The mailbox viewer does not come up (I found it under "Window"). When it did, it looks completely different, doesn't have the buttons up the top , the blue dots indicating a read message are missing etc. I now have some mail in the inbox ( I have 2 inboxes, both IMAP) but only the at the top of the viewer window. The bottom 2/3 is blank - perhaps thats where the preview pane is supposed to be. All my mailboxes on the mac are empty (I do have a backup). i CAN highlight a particular mailbox and choose "rebuild" and it fills up with messages in the bizzaro message viewer
I cant play with it - many commands are unresponsive - eg Preferences, new message viewer etc. I cant even quit. I cant compose a new message, although one time I tried it did give me a "new message" window that was totally unfamiliar.
I have reinstalled it a number of times. I have tried repair disk permissions.
is there any way I can un-install mail and install a clean one? is there a clean one somewhere? The combo doesn't give me an optional install option
Imac intel based 2008   Mac OS X (10.6.4)    

Answer 1

I tried trashing it and downloading a fresh copy from the App Store three or four times (including removing the receipts in /private/var/db/receipts), which hasn't worked.
Mark, what do you mean by "hasn't worked"? Could you not download and reinstall, or did the reinstall not fix the issue?
The crash log is not very specific:
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
That can either mean a data error or system trouble - by data error I mean, that you may have imported corrupted media (photos or video), or your disk trouble has corrupted images in your iPhoto library. Corrupted media cannot eb fixed by rebuilding the library, and other application may still be able to browse your iPhoto library.
To check, if your iPhoto library may be causing this, test with a new, empty iPhoto library. Try, if you can launch iPhoto with the alt/options-key ⌥ held down and select "Create New". If yes, test, if iPhoto will work with a new library. If a new iPhoto library works, post back. Then you need to remove your last import from your iPhoto library.
If not, some setting in your user account or installed helper applications, preference panes, etc may be causing this or a system corruption.
Then try to launch iPhoto in Safe Mode: Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? .
and post abck with the results.
Regards
Léonie