Windows Live Mail sorted by date: not working correctly

I recently helped someone who used Windows Live Mail 2011 for their mail client, and a weird situation developed: even though her mail was sorted by date, with the newest mail supposedly at the top, it was not completely that way; some messages were a few or many entries further down that they should have been, obviously out of order.
Resolution: after finding this page, we turned off conversation grouping (no idea how it got turned on in the first place) and all was well.
The steps:

1. open Windows Live Mail
2. go to the View tab
3. click on Conversations and choose Off.

Had I not figured this out, I would have switched her over to the eM Client mail application, which looks like it has a nice feature set, including calendar, and can import data from various Microsoft mail systems. It's free for basic non-commercial use.