AppleMail: Performance Issues

When using AppleMail I am seeing a slow down in performance. When I launch AppleMail the menus are slow, tabbing from one field to another is also slow. I don't have these performance problems in other programs.

I have over 40 Font families installed, and I removed QuickDraw GX but that didn't help. What's wrong?
There is a problem in versions of AppleMail prior to version 1.1.2 of AppleMail. If the Fonts folder in your System Folder contains a large number of fonts earlier versions of AppleMail function slowly.

To increase the performance of AppleMail, you need to update the version of AppleMail to version 1.1.2. AppleMail 1.1.2 is part of System 7.5 Update 1.0.

This article can help you locate the software update mentioned here:
Published Date: Feb 19, 2012