MAIL. Saving to RTF/D strips attachments + changes font

Please can someone help me out with this problem I have been having, I think, since I changed to Leopard?

I have posted appeals for help here and in myriad other places over the last year or so and it yields nothing. One person on a forum who was kind enough to take an interest said they could not duplicate the problem with his system ( Leopard) and I assume many people have systems which are working and that it must be pilot error.

I have reinstalled the OS several times in an attempt to get back to how it should be and I think it did work okay briefly but cannot be certain that it was in all cases. Needless to say, after devoting a day last weekend to putting in a replacement OS I am back this weekend to having the same problem.

The problem is described like this:

I conduct much of my daily business using Mail. It involves the sending of rich text messages to clients and contractors etc, to which they reply and, when they reply quoting me, my words are in something like Times or Times NR 16pt, even though they left here as 11 pt Helvetica. If it were just this I could probably learn to live with it but, at the end of the business day, I save off messages from that day to their respective Project files as RTF or RTFD files. Here is where it gets really frustrating as when I look at the file in Text Edit later I find that the saving process has stripped out the attachments and converted my text to Times 16pt. The attachments are most usually PDF files which, if not too large, display in line or, if sizeable, are shown by the icon only. Usually it is displayed. This obviously makes for a ponderous problem with my workflow, which was ideal before this started happening. Furthermore, as I go back into files from the transition time, before I realised what was happening I find I have lost valuable information.

When I have a two or three page eMail with in line images I also occasionally need to print it off for a paper copy to go in the paper project file. I experience problems here very often too. In that in the print dialogue box it shows a small image of the document on the left and very often it shows (page) 1 of 1, when there are, say, three pages. I have a default setting of "keep the same apparent font size" but if I click through the rewrap and scale options the image on the left of the dialogue box changes and it shows the other pages, even if I then go back to "keep the same..." This is clearly a bug and I am wondering if this is what is affecting the saving process too.

I know there is a work around by printing the whole thing to PDF but it does not help if I want later to extract parts and it is not ideal and I am not sure I can wait until next autumn for Snow Leopard to sort this.

You may be sending JPEGS back and forth between two Macs and wonder what I am going on about but I surely cannot be the only person with this problem. I am running a 2.3 dual G5 with the latest version of everything. I have several print drivers for HP, Epson. Also one for Print Window (which keeps crashing - anyone know any good alternatives to Print Window?). Encoding is default.

Any words of comfort would be greatly appreciated and apologies for the lack of brevity.

Drew