Mail App gone, Reinstall hasn't worked

First off, I want to say that I'm so glad I made the switch from PC to Mac 3 years ago.
I bought a used 4-year-old Macbook Pro and it's still going strong. No problems.
I work in the IT industry and I'm glad I do because all of the other PC's I've owned needed heavy maintenance throughout their lifespan (which was usually 3 years).

Anyway, I've never had a problem with my Mac until now.
The other day I was creating a website so I downloaded an FTP app (off of Apple.com's site) to upload the files.
After installing that app, many of my other apps disappeared - Safari, Open Office, Mail, iWeb, etc.

I was able to get all of those working again except for Mail.
I followed some advice on this board and downloaded Pacifist. This allowed me to extract and install Mail back onto my laptop.
However, once installed it wouldn't load up because the version was lower than my OS.
So I installed the latest Combo pack and extracted Mail from that using Pacifist.
Mail would then 'work' (as I saw Mail in the top toolbar), but there was no GUI accompanying the toolbar.
And I had to force quit it in order to get out of the program.

Does anyone have any advice how to get this working again without needing to reinstall the OS?

Thanks!

Once you have the Mail menu bar up, try clicking on File > New Viewer Window

see if that brings it back up

What FTP program did you download and install? I can't imagine that doing what you said happened to you system.

Dysfunction said:

Once you have the Mail menu bar up, try clicking on File > New Viewer Window

see if that brings it back up

Click to expand...

I believe I tried that, but my mind has gone blank from all the troubleshooting, hahah. I'll give that a shot tonight.
Thanks!

scweb, the FTP client I downloaded was this one:
Apple - Downloads - Internet Utilities - Classic FTP for Mac

The other weird thing about the process was that after I installed Mail from the combo update, the icon changed from the regular stamp to what looked like a piece of paper with a pen across it.
Weird.

I'll try again tonight.
Thanks guys!

EDIT: The problem didn't occur immediately after I installed FTP Client. It happened after I tried transferring files to my website.
The connection disconnected. I rebooted the laptop and after that I noticed all the apps being gone.

I've had this same problem.

Dysfunction said:

Once you have the Mail menu bar up, try clicking on File > New Viewer Window

see if that brings it back up

Click to expand...

Just tried it and nothing.
Not only that, but if I want to exit out of Mail I have to force exit it.
I'm buying 10.6 tomorrow and I'm hoping that can fix it.
If not, I guess I have to resintall my OS. Bummer.