Is OE failing becuase it is trying to download messages that then crash it? Or is it crashing anyway whether it manages to connect to your POP server or not?

In the case of the former, OE can sometimes be tripped up by badly-formatted emails (usually spam) and will hang/error/crash.

Try using something more capable like Mozilla to connect to your account and delete the offending email (set it to leave the messages on the server), then go back to OE and re-connect.

Edit: Just re-read one of the messages in the thread you linked to. Seems this it's the latter.