I know you're holding your breath waiting for an update here, so I'm on it...

Okay, so I cheated a little. I didn't permanently disable tea timer, I just exited out of resident protection a few times...just to see if it made a difference of any kind. It didn't fix the blank hotmail reply issue, (that's a microsoft problem) but I did notice something that seems odd to me. After enabling resident protection and surfing the net for a while, I'd run windows "one care" clean up....and every single time resident protection was enabled in IE, the scan results came up with at least 15 invalid registries.
If I disabled the resident protection function in IE, and ran the same scan (one care) after surfing for a while, there were NO invalid registries detected. Any idea why that might be?