Windows 7: Outlook 2003 Neuters HTML messages... some

Hi gang
I have high hopes 'cause this is my current fave tech support forum. learned much.
I actually am a Tech but this one has me embarrassingly confused.

This is on my own squeaky clean personal rig I use daily: magnificent HP DC7300 running windows 7 Ultimate 64-b, and Offfice Pro 2003 among other things. I use Outlook for my mail most of the time and have three accounts tracking in it: one roadrunner, two hotmail.

I have set every option I can find to enable/support HTML, but starting a week or two ago, I get SOME HTML messages rendered as plain text with fairly big font size and line breaks inserted. If I pop open the message [and these are from good safe/marked senders] into the Word reading mode, its all plain text with a few random characters from being converted, and of course I have no option to convert back to html, and actually nothing would tell me that it had been neutered except I know what its supposed to look like.

If I go to hotmail on the web using any browser I like, it looks great - perfect HTML message.



I'm baffled. Everything is up to date except I have no idea what the Outlook Connector does exactly or how to tweak it if it happens to be the culprit here. [an aside... did MS contract-out that little bit of odd code?].
I occasionally get error messages when Send/Receive has just happened, but it seems to be errant errors if you know what I mean. timeout of something but all the mail gets sent, and all the mail gets received, so I dunno...

All help gladly received and many copious thanks given!