"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...


"Rheilly Phoull" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:36 PM, Gareth Magennis wrote:
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


So Gareth,
Were you saying something ??


Err,,,
I have exactly the same problem. I'm on Windows 7, and using Windows Live
Mail to read usenet, and have Avast.

To be honest, I thought this "many posters just repeating the original
post" was a running gag until I checked this thread on Google Groups, to
find it wasn't at all how my newsreader displays it.

(Hence my feeble attempt here to join in with the running gag that never
was).


I thought it was quite a good gag, actually!



Gareth.

Funnily enough, I did 'get it' and figured that was exactly what you were
doing. You and I must have a very similar sense of humour ... So have you
cleared the problem up ? I've just done the removing of port 119 from the
NNTP checker as advised by Lee above, and that has allowed me to restore all
the mail checking in Avast, whilst leaving usenet alone. I too am using
Windows 7. The thing is, what has triggered this behaviour suddenly ? I am
not aware of any recent upgrade to the core of Avast. As far as I know, it
always tells you if there is an update to the program rather than the
definitions, which update automatically. I wonder if they have piggybacked a
core update to a definitions update ? Interestingly, last week, my workshop
machine, which runs W2K Pro and Avast, *did* report an update to the Avast
program core, which I then manually allowed. I assumed that this was because
the update was specifically for machines running 2K, and was the reason that
my W7 machine did not report the same update being available. I'm beginning
to wonder now ...

Arfa