Denise Snow wrote:

It does run faster in plain text mode.

The dbx files are as follows: DeletedItems.dbx 1867kb, Drafts.dbx 137kb,
Folders.dbx 73kb, Inbox.dbx 137kb, Jokes(1).dbx 1807kb, Nortons AntiSpam
Folder.dbx 59kb, Offline.dbx 10kb, Outbox.dbx 75kb, Other.dbx 137kb,
Pop3uidl.dbx 10kb, SentItems.dbx 75kb, VideoCard.dbx 137kb.

Some of them are way too big.

Why are you keeping around all those deleted items? Delete them from
the Deleted Items folder to actually get rid of them. You can also
configure OE to purge the Deleted Items folder when you exit OE.

Do you really need to keep all those old jokes around? If so, drag the
message to a folder in Windows Explorer to save it outside of OE (and
delete it from OE). If you later need to read a joke e-mail, just
double-click on it. It will be an .eml file which is a text file so you
can also open it in Notepad.

Once you delete unneeded items from the oversized folders (and then
delete them from the Deleted Items folder since nothing in there has
been deleted but just moved since it obviously still exists for you to
see it in that folder), do a compaction. Delete-marked items are not
physically purged from the .dbx files. They are just hidden by the
e-mail client; i.e., you won't see them but they are still there.
Compaction while physically purge the delete-marked items from the .dbx
files to make them smaller. As I said, the limit is 2GB (that is the
decimal value whereas the binary value is 1.87 GiB and it appears you
are at that limit). Not keeping these files significantly under the
limit will result in their corruption when they exceed that limit.

I have no idea what Pop3uidl.dbx is!!

Every email delivered to a mailbox must be assigned a unique ID number.
That is the job of the mail server. Every message ID assigned to a
received e-mail must remain unique throughout the lifetime of that
mailbox. POP has no concept of what are new or old messages. That a
message is old is simply your e-mail client keeping tracking of what you
previously downloaded from your mailbox. To know what it previously
downloaded, it has to keep a record of every message ID for every e-mail
that it downloaded, and that is what this file is for.

I have cleaned out all of my email folders to try to help this issue. I
have disabled Nortons antivirus on email. The email we are trying to open is
17kb.

Since it opens faster when forcing OE to read e-mails in plain-text
mode, that HTML-formatted problematic e-mail has links to external
content that must be retrieved every time you open it. Their file
server is slow, hosts in the route between you and their file server are
slow, or the size of that external content that you end up downloading
is huge. The local copy of the HTML code for the e-mail may only be
17KB but that doesn't prevent an external link from downloading many
megabytes from their file server to your host.

Did opening their e-mail get faster when you configured OE to block
external content, as suggested before?