Mail + Gmail deselects messages in list

My company recently switched to Google Apps (Gmail) for our mail. I've got my IMAP account setup in Mail, but have an incredibly frustrating problem. As I'm deleting messages in the inbox, the message pane will deselect the current message, apparently as it deletes/resyncs with the server. If I have 4 unread messages, and rapidly delete the first 3, the 4th will be selected for a brief moment, and then no message will be selected. Meaning I have to click on the 4th message to read and/or delete it. Sometimes it's deselected multiple times after clicking on it, meaning I have to click on the message repeatedly to even read it. Once the Activity window shows activity has ceased, the problem stops. Sometimes it will even scroll the window to the top of my Inbox, so I will have to scroll down and click on the message that should already be selected.

I've done quite a bit of searching on Google and in these forums and haven't found a similar problem. This is surprising, since 3 out of 3 Mail users in my office have the exact same problem. I never had this problem before switching to Gmail (our previous mail server was Qmail).

Help please! This basically makes Mail unusable for me since I get hundreds of emails per day. I loathe to switch to Thunderbird, but I may have to if I can't figure this out (does Thunderbird have decent threading yet?)

Thanks!