BFU,
Can't help you re the HTML emails - sorry.
Re the Word problem: On my old system Word97 on Win98SE does as you say - click and drag highlighting over page boundaries occurs at lightning speed and is uncontrollable.
The work-around is to place the cursor at the start of the area you want to select, scroll to the end of the area, press and hold Shift and click.
On my new system Word 2002 on XP doesn't seem to have the same problem.
Cheers
AA