"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...
A couple of nights back, my Xnews stopped working - sort of. I'd just
installed some Windoze updates. Nothing special, just the weekly security
crap, so I immediately suspected that. I removed the updates, but still had
a problem. Usenet access via Thunderbird seemed to still be ok, as did
Windows Live Mail. What was happening was that a selected group's headers
would download, and load up ok in the program. You could pick any message
anywhere in the list of headers, and from anywhere within a thread, and the
message body would download, and display correctly. But when you then tried
to select any further messages, although the new message body appeared to
download - as in you could see a normal-looking burst of activity on the
modem lights - when the new message was then displayed, it was in fact the
first one again. And so for any message selected. All that was ever
displayed was the very first message selected.

I found this odd, as Xnews is basically a stand-alone dot exe. It does not
have to be 'installed' as such, so no real system hooks. Never-the-less, I
removed it, and reinstated it from a backup copy that I keep on an
external drive. Exactly the same. I then discovered that in fact
Thunderbird and Live Mail were also having similar problems with access to
messages, but nothing like as consistently as Xnews. Some messages would
download and display correctly, but others would lock you into this 'same
message over and over' behaviour again.

So having sat back and thought about the problem, I came to the conclusion
that about the only thing between Xnews and the news server itself, was
the virus checker. It is Avast that I use, and it has never caused me a
problem in all the time I have been using it since it first came out. I
have not authorised any updates to the core program recently, so I was
reluctant to believe that this could be the problem. Never-the-less, when
I did a bulk disable of all the shields that it had running, the problem
went away. Reinstating them one by one, it came down to the Mail Defender
shield that was causing the problem. So for the moment, when I use Xnews,
I am just invoking the "switch off shields for 1 hour" option in Avast.

So anyone else had any problems ? Any of the computah deep-understanders
on here, got any idea what exactly Avast is doing to cause this behaviour,
or what has started it ?

Arfa

No problems w/ Avast so far.. using Windoze Mail for newsgroups.

Mark Z.