Mail.app causing system freeze?

Firstly, I suffered my first ever kernel panic on this machine last night, and I have an inkling that Mail had something to do with it.

I have Mail as one of my login items and when I tried rebooting after the KP the whole system froze as soon as Mail appeared. I hard restarted and ran TechTool Pro and Disk Utility through a different account, along with the Apple Hardware Test DVD as I had been getting the "RAM not verified" sound on boot. All my hardware passed the test but I could still log in to the super-user account on the machine meaning the OS was fine.

Eventually I put this down to my account being corrupt so I ran various diagnostics and repair tools before attempting to log back in under my account. When I do log in, Mail launches and the system promptly freezes, forcing another hard restart. I'm now posting from my account which I'm only able to do because I force quit Mail upon start up and everything's been running smoothly for about 10-15 minutes.

I like Mail: can you help me make it better?

EDIT: Oooh yeah, this is with 10.4.10.

 

Heh heh, I realised I hadn't posted my OS when I re-read my post. Sorry.

Mail is v2.1 and I receive both Gmail and my corporate mail via POP3.