Mail opens - no message viewer - no access to subfolders

Question

I have spent some hours searching the forum for a fix to no avail. Mail was working fine when I shut down last night. My daughter started it up this morning and Safari crashed a couple of times and apparently a window came up that told her to restart (she has a disability so I'm not entirely sure of the accuracy of this). When I clicked on Mail from the Dock it started up but no message viewer appeared. I managed to get up a viewer of sorts by going to 'Message viewer' in the Windows menu. When that came up it didn't show any emails and no folders on the left. By going to the Mailbox menu I could get up the content of the Inbox by choosing it from the 'Go to' submenu. I could also access 'Drafts', 'Sent', 'Trash' and 'Outbox'. When I went to the 'Messages' menu and passed by 'Move to' the folders appeared on the left hand side but if I clicked on any of them no messages were displayed - the inbox was still showing - but they were not greyed out. I could not send a new email, but I could reply to an email although the message did not look like it normally would as it didn't have the detail about the previous sender and it put in 'REPLY_ATTRIBUTION' above the email text. The only way it would send was for me to take the accounts offline and then take them online again.
I have repaired permissions, started up from my Tiger install disc and used Disc Utility to repair the start up disc - there was a minor repair to Volume Bit Map. I backed up the mail and then deleted the envelope index and the 'Mac-" folders and left the 4 other POP accounts. I then started up Mail from the applications folder and it asked if I wanted to import the mailboxes which I did. That appeared to all go well but when I said 'Done' there was still no message viewer.
The only way I can access mail from my subfolders is to do a search, but this is not how I want to work - please someone tell me what I need to do!
Thanking you in advance,
Helen

Answer 1

This is starting to look like you’ll have to do a full Archive and Install. It’s strange that the problem persists after doing all the above if it’s system wide, though, and no, I don’t think reinstalling any other security updates would have made a difference.
BTW, I’ve just realized that the last comment at the bottom of my first post didn’t make sense. I hope you realized it or at least that I didn’t confuse you too much. I copied & pasted what I posted in another topic without realizing that the comment at the bottom was specific to that problem.
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Look for additional information that may be available in the form of error messages written to the Console:
1. Open /Applications/Utilities/Console.
2. From the File menu, choose either Open Console Log, or Open System Log, or both, so that Console displays the contents of both system.log and console.log.
3. Reproduce the problem and look at the bottom of the Console windows for messages that might be written there as a result.
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Do you have any Mail plug-ins? In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, you may open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you can just copy it here and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You may then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.