At one point I was able to view on my BB the email subfolders stored on my desktop. I don't know when, but at some point I couldn't view them anymore. My IT person had me go into mail settings in desktop manager and specifically select the folders I want to be able to view (under the heading "folder redirection"). The changes appear to have gone through on the desktop manager, yet I'm still unable to view the selected email folders on my BB. The folders show up (as they did before I changed the settings) but when I select them, they're empty.
Well finally got the answer. My IT person went above his head to the regional IT and learned that to save space on the server they limited the content of the folders. So it turns out there's no technical problem. Now I (we) know. Thanks for all your input.