...nwood...

1. I already had Cygwin installed. http://cygwin.com/
2. Grabbed these Cygwin ispell binaries: ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz (Here's the README.)
3. From the Cygwin shell:
   

    cd / #change to cygwin root dir impt!
   tar zxvf [path/to/tarball/]cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz
   

4. At the Windows desktop right-click My Computer and choose Properties, click the Advanced tab and then the Environment Variables button.
   

2006-08-17: I just followed these directions using Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 for Windows, External Editor v.072 and emacs 21.3. Everything works.

On the subject of using external editors with Mozilla products, I discovered that there is a very nice extension for Thunderbird: External Editor. Thanks to Philip Nilsson maintainer of the (now defunct?) extension Editus Externus for referencing this extension.

Note: External Editor (Globs.org) works with Thunderbird. To get the same functionality with Firefox textareas, the best thing that I've found is Mozex 1.07.1 mentioned in How to have a qwiki at work: Mozdev, Emacs and PHPWiki.

As a one-time English major, I celebrate some twisted
pride in documenting my code and projects. In my zeal I've created a slew of text files, many with similar names,
many with deprecated info. How I could organize this
mess in such a way that it would be intelligible to another?
Moreover, how can I improve my own ability to quickly locate
information (full text searching) and deftly navigate related documents?

My problem seemed a perfect excuse to learn more about wikis and how I could tweek my familiar tools to make authoring a wiki quick and convenient.