It seems as though the honeymoon period between my iBook and myself is drawing to an end with todays problems with Mail. Everything was going fine, I've been happily downloading my spam email over the last few days until today I started playing with a couple of new apps (although I believe it to be purely coincidental).

Mail, aka mail.app, hangs upon startup. It eventually comes to life about a minute or so later, but there's obviously something wrong. I verified my permissions on disc, no problems here. I changed the IP address of my router and the DHCP allocation range from 192.168.*.* to 10.0.*.*, also manually added DNS servers as per the Mail discussion forums at http://discussions.info.apple.com/.

Most people brought it down to 10.3.7, which I've been running ever since the software update icon started jumping up and down, so I don't believe that to be my problem. Nor do I believe it to be related to the IPv6 settings, which I also turned off. If anyone has the faintest idea on what would cause this I'd much appreciate it if you would either leave a comment on this post, a trackback, or even an email. If I don't get it resolved by the weekend I guess it's time for my first Mac OS X reinstallation!