Phantom GMail messages in mail.app

Here's my situation:
At one time I decided it would be lovely to point mail.app at my GMail account. I changed my mind about this pretty quickly (once I figured out that it was going to take approximately 11 years to download all of my gmail messages, since I rarely delete anything from gmail).
The "phantom messages" I reference in the subject line are these: references to gmail messages that do not exist on my machine. During the normal course of using mail, I don't ever see them, but they turn up by the thousands when I search for messages or when I create a Smart Mailbox. I'm starting to suspect that they may be implicated in some of the mail slowness that I have been experiencing, in particular slowness of Smart Mailboxes (which, ideally, I would like to use to organize my RSS feeds).
Here's what it looks like:
The little "Show in mailbox" text that looks like it ought to be a link is nothing - can't click it, can't highlight it, nada.
I have recently rebuilt ALL of my .plist files in an attempt to address the "mail won't quit" problem (the one that's NOT related to notes or mobile me - seems to have worked, by the way), so I know that's not going to solve the problem. When I look at /Library/Mail, there is no evidence of a GMail mailbox anywhere.
So. Does anybody know how I can get rid of these? There are literally tens of thousands of them - one search turns up over 16000 phantom messages. I can delete them, which makes them not show up in searches anymore. Interestingly, when I delete them they do NOT show up in my Trash... they simply vanish. So I could manually delete them all, but that would take a really long time.

Bump... anybody have any ideas on this one?

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<hr>
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Phantom GMail messages in mail.app

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