Strange behavior with Warning: Low Stock email

My admin is set to send email in mime-type HTML format
It is also set to send Admin emails in HTML format.
Email archiving is turned on.

When I preview HTML emails in the Email Archive manager, it seems to give me a mess of CSS information, a very limited amount of which looks like:

.body {background-color:#ffffff; color:#000000; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;} a:link {color:#0066cc;} a:hover 

It seems like all previews of HTML look like that in the Email Archive Manager....
Yet when I re-send the email, it formats properly and does not show any of that css/html code.

This is true with the exception of the Low Stock messages....which actually emails the css/html/php code (severely trimmed to first line only):

$EMAIL_SUBJECT
_html_ _head_ _meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /_ _base href="

Somehow the rendering of the email into a nicely formatted HTML document does not occur and I can't for the life of me figure out what might be going on.

Any ideas?

I notice when I preview the html for the low stock emails that the code reads:

body {background-color:#ffffff; color:#000000; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:center;}

I suspect there should be a . before body (at least that is the only thing I can spot that is different between that preview and the other emails. I'm not sure what file to go look at to correct this.

turns out these are all html files in the email folder.
A number of them have a similar line as the email_template_low_stock (starting with body rather than .body) so that is likely not the cause of the mischief.

Confirmed. Must have been a hiccup server side.
Just had a customer make a purchase that triggered a low-stock email and it worked fine.
The only other change that was made was I changed the email address of the admin to a different one - the original one was also in the database as a customer (set to receive email as html) but was not sure if that played any role.