Apple Mail issues - ATT00001.txt , missing incoming attachments

Apple mail has been a big pain in the ass for sometime for me. Occasionally it will drop incoming attachments. no rhyme or reason. It seems to prefer dropping the larger attachments, but it has dropping smaller ones too. The attachments show up ok in webmail. I am using snow leopard and use exchange imap.

this thread suggests trying to set the prefered format to html always to avail the issue. it kinda sorta worked on some cases for me. I am still loosing attachments but less frequently

Permanent solution:

Quit Mail
Open Terminal,
Enter "defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool FALSE"
Open Mail.

second issue i have is when sending attachments, my friends often see an extraneous blank attachment. The solution for it seems to me to check the following options

 Edit->Attachment-> Send windows Friendy Attchment
 Edit->Attachment-> Insert attachment at the end of the message