I HATE Evolution ! Thunderbird ?

[linuxguy]

I've been using Evolution as my email client since RH8.  I hate it
because it seems to get confused if one opens up an email or changes
mail folders while it is downloading emails from the server. 

When it does this, it goes into a death spiral of "saving folder" and
"Retrieving message XXXX" and "Fetching mail".

This wouldn't be that annoying except that when it happens it uses
almost 100% of the processor power and doesn't seem to respond to "nice"
settings. 

Furthermore, the process takes forever to resolve itself.  It may get
the folder "99%" stored in 5 to 10 minutes, but then it goes for 15
minutes before the status changes.  And you can't view/edit/send any
email while this is happening.  It totally ties up my laptop and is
terrible for battery life when it happens.

Usually I resort to shutting down Evolution with "evolution
--force-shutdown".  Then I run "evolution --offline" to restart it,
whereby at least that removes the "Fetching mail" process from messing
things up.  It also helps not to "Restore settings" so that the email
its trying to retrieve doesn't mess things up. 
> 
That  leaves just the "storing folder" process to run.   It generates
tons of errors if you run it from the command line. 

FWIW, there is nothing wrong with my hard drive.   I've had this issue
on 2 different computers. 

My email setup is 6 different gmail accounts, being sorted into about 25
folders via rules.   The largest folder has about 150,000 messages in
it.  The smallest one has 5,000 messages in it.

Is anyone using Thunderbird like this ?  How does it compare ?  How hard
is it to move over to it ?

Thanks