Mail crashes on opening any message with attachments

Question

mail crashes on opening any message with attachments
this started happening about a month ago. I thought the problem was that there was too much mail in the program -
so, I acquired a program called MAILSTEWARD (which I recommend!) and it stores & saves my old mail.
I reset MAIL, so it kept my address and smart folder instructions etc, but all the mail itself was gone (I forget how I did that - I probably will try it again...)
for a few weeks, everything was fine - I could open an eMail with an attachment, and it worked.
but now it started crashing again everytime there's an attachment!
don't know what to do - there's only a month's worth of mail in there (which I should clean out anyhow) - but it seems to me that's not too much...
thanks!
w

Answer 1

that's it - I ran the updater - and I believe I have been able to use it all day without the program crashing when it encounters an attachment.
one goofy thing I noticed, for the first time, there appear to be two applications folders on my start-up drive (1) in my user folder (2) in the "main" hard drive folder.
MAIL is in both - I believe the "main" one was updated; when I turned on the "user" MAIL it crashed when I opened an eMail with an attachment; when I opened the same eMail with the "main" mail there was no problem.
now what does this tell us?
thanks again!
will