Mail App dead after Leopard upgrade + 10.5.6 update

Question

Has anyone else ended up with a dead Mail app after upgrading to Leopard and applying the 10.5.6 update? Mail app would appear to launch, but would not run or quit. Reinstalling the 10.5.6 combo update didn't help. I had to reinstall Leopard from scratch to fix the problem. Needless to say, I updated to 10.5.5 the second time and everything works fine. But it appears that 10.5.6 can lay some nasty surprises on you.

Answer 1

After upgrading from Tiger to Leopard with the default method Mail was the only thing that didn't work. It wouldn't open a Mail window, appeared to be open on the menu bar and in the dock but would not quit from either command. I had to force quit. When I finally got a mail window to appear, all my email profiles and folders appeared in the left hand bar, but nary an email to be seen in any location. I could not send or receive emails. Pretty much dead!
I didn't have a meltdown because I'd archived my most important emails that were in my folders. I dug through dozens of posts on multiple forums and tried a procedure I could see was making it worse. I shut down the computer so I could get help from AppleCare this morning.
I got in trouble following the less than adequate instructions from The AppleBlog; inadequate because it didn't say where to move the folders and plist to. My most helpful Apple Tech advised me that I needed to QUIT Mail before dragging ONLY the ~Library>Preferences>com.apple.mail.plist file to my desktop. The two folders need to stay in the Library.
After you are out of Mail, on the desktop click on the plist to highlight it. Use Control-click to display the popup menu and select Copy for the plist. Open finder window and select ONLY Preferences (~Library>Preferences) so the word Preferences is highlighted. Go to the Finder>Edit>Paste drop down menu of the toolbar. Select Paste. It will ask if you want to replace the newly created plist with the one you just copied. Select replace. Relaunch Mail and that should restore all your Mail Profiles and retrieve your messages.
This process even brought back my mail folders and put all my saved messages back where they were filed. I didn't have to get into my archived messages file after all.
I just wish I could have found this simpler fix online without spending hours searching and reading conflicting suggestions. Maybe this will help someone else fix their problem faster.