Mail.app stopped working over IMAP to exchange 2003 server

Hi Peoples,
I'm posting this as a problem with the solution simply because of the absolute bizarre behavior that I observed....
PROBLEM
On Thursday night, without me having made any changes to either my mac or my exchange server, mail.app just stopped working. The problem was like many I've read about on various forums including this one but none of the solutions worked. Basically the problem was that the server would no longer authenticate mail.app's connection attempts. It failed both plain text and SSL with both NTLM and password style authentication. IMAP from a PC was still working OK (I keep this around for testing). So I tried the following...
Removed all the relevant keychain entries - no go
Removed the entire login keychain - no go
Removed & reconfigured the exchange account config from mail.app - no go
Removed the entire config from mail.app (i.e. removed ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist ) - bop-bong still no go
created a new IMAP service in exchange in case something was screwed there - no go
created a new user in exchange and tried that user - still no go
sledge hammer approach - reinstalled OS X - no go
48+ hours later... Getting very frustrated by now... scratching head...
SOLUTION
OK (should have done this much earlier and saved much pain), time to install another IMAP client on the mac and see what happens.... installed Thunderbird and low and behold it worked first go with and without SSL - hmmm
Restarted mail.app and reconfigured to use same settings as thunderbird (SSL with password authentication - no NTLM)
What the????? Now it all works again....
I cannot for the life of me figure out why this happened, and why only mail.app was affected. Obviously, something went screwy on the Exchange server and caused mail.app to have a coronary. Whatever it was, other IMAP clients seemed to be able to handle it. Was it the install and subsequent use of thunderbird that fixed it - I hope not but who knows...
Think I'll be keep thunderbird installed in case it happens again... very, very, very strange.
Anyways... hope this helps if anyone else experiences such unexplainable weirdness.
Cheers - I'm going to have Chardy on the balcony and think about something else.

Just thought I'd update with the latest... This problem happened again this morning and again, the only way to fix it was to connect from the mac with another IMAP client (I used Thunderbird again) and immediately the problem was fixed.
Need to do some detailed network analysis here to see exactly what's going on but it's definitely a case of mail.app not playing nicely with Exchange (or vice versa).
Cheers, time for a JD

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