On 14/01/2012 16:42, Arfa Daily wrote:

However, in this case, it does not appear to be server / ISP related. I
did suspect that it might be, so I Googled for another free-access news
server, and put that into Xnews. It behaved exactly the same.


Since it works with the mail shield disabled it's probably Avast then,
guess that whatever they did which fixed it for me, broke it for you

Not a solution, but you can tell Avast to stop redirecting/scanning nttp
port 119.
Of course that means it won't scan newsgroup posts, but at least you
shouldn't then have to turn off the email scanning.

(Avast -settings/troubleshooting/redirect settings/mail and change the
port number in the nttp box or leave it blank.)