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

"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.

On Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:45:03 -0000, "Arfa Daily"
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 ?

As I understand it (which may not be much), Avast prefers that one
connects to the standard (non-SSL ports) for POP3, SMTP, and NNTP. Avast
intercepts the traffic, scans it, and then (if available) handles the
traffic via a secure SSL/TLS link to the provider. It appears to handle
the configuration pretty much automagically but you can check what ports
it's using in the Mail Shield | Expert Settings | SSL Accounts tab.

If XNews uses a non-standard NNTPS port (i.e., not 563) or it has
recently changed its SSL/TLS settings then maybe your Avast has gotten
confused. You should be able to manually set the port to use, or to
remove the SSL setting entirely, from the referenced tab.

--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA

On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily 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

Not internet related as such, but I found yesterday that Avast prevents
some of the newer Popcap games from running. I have no problem with
email or n/gs so far running in conjunction with Avast.

Ron

On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news
server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on occasion
so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.

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

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 ??

On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second post
about our shared problem.
Mikek

On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:

snip


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 ?


Try to telnet to the server, substituting whatever ports and addresses
are set in Xnews. See if you can manually pull messages by ID and their
relatives, doing actions side by side with the same post/thread in Xnews.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/...a-news-server-

--
Adrian C

"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second post
about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it to
see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info you
collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:

snip


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 ?


Try to telnet to the server, substituting whatever ports and addresses are
set in Xnews. See if you can manually pull messages by ID and their
relatives, doing actions side by side with the same post/thread in Xnews.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/...a-news-server-

--
Adrian C


You are getting close to exceeding my computah expertise level there,
Adrian, but I will try to give it a go ...

Arfa

"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news
server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on occasion
so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have in the
past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated with server
maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who works for them,
and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when there's been a
problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

Yes I do have Avast installed. I have had Avast installed for a long
time. I haven't updated for a long time. so I'm doubtful that Avast is
the problem. ( I did update just this morning, but it didn't help my
problem) I have not tried temporarily disabling it.
No response to the forum question. Kind off a busy forum, but no help
in an hour :-)
You might add your post.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=39
Mikek

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.)

"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.

On 1/14/2012 2:49 PM, Gareth Magennis wrote:


"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.
Interesting, 3 people having the problem, all 3 are using avast.
Coincidence or causality, inquiring minds want to know.
As far as a gag, it's starting make me mad!
Still no response on the forum.
Mikek

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news
server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on occasion
so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have in
the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated with
server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who works for
them, and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when there's been
a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple of
headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of the day
only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting headers and
displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able to
search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume tagging from
there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers uploading
*HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews couldn't handle that
many headers!

On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek

"Lee" wrote in message
...
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.)


Thanks Lee. Done that. Got a result. Everything now switched back on in
Avast, and no probs with Xnews :-)

Arfa

"Ian Field" wrote in message
news

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news
server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on occasion
so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have in
the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated with
server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who works
for them, and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when there's
been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple of
headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of the day
only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting headers
and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able to
search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume tagging from
there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews couldn't
handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I
discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of groups,
and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This is a pretty
quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will download all
those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of course, they go
back a long way, and although the headers are there, the message bodies seem
not to be, and you get the "message not found - shall I search Google"
message. Thing is, I've never quite figured in Xnews, what exactly invokes
the window with the sliders in, when you enter a group. You seem to get it
on some, but not on others. And then ones that you do get it on, will
suddenly stop showing it, and will only download 'new' article headers for
weeks, before suddenly starting to show it again. Has that been your
experience as well ? I wish I knew where the setting was to stop it coming
up so that only new headers were loaded, and why it seems to reset itself
from time to time. Anyone know ? If you really want to download all the
headers, you can always invoke that window manually with the "Refresh
Headers Special" setting in the "Groups" drop down.

Arfa

"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

"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the "Mail
Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast troubleshooting
section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I have done this, and
it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back on for both incoming and
outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access alone, and removing the problem.
So that's a good interim fix, but as you say, it would be useful to know
what the real problem is so that usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa

On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa

I did the change suggested by Lee and it works fine, I also undid the
change and in the Mail Shield section I clicked on "Expert Settings"
in there I unchecked the box that says;
"scan newsgroup messages (NNTP)" This also works,
Is one method preferable to the other?
Mikek

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


Hi Arfa,

no I haven't cleared the problem up. I had a look at Avast and turned off
the real time mail scanning thing, then thought better of it and turned it
back on again.

To be honest, this is not enough of a problem for me to mess with turning
bits of the antivirus off. I expect eventually some upgrade will sort
things out for me.
I've only come across 2 threads where I noticed this anomaly, funnily
enough, this being one of them!
(Hence my initial belief it was a gag)

Btw, my symptoms are identical to the spoof reply I posted - the first four
(Marks, Rich's, Ron's and Lee's) replies all appear identical to my spoof
one, all others in the thread are normal.


Cheers!



Gareth.

On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa
I sent our troubleshooting and solutions to Avast this morning.
Maybe on their next iteration they will fix it.
BTW, I installed my version on 11-3-11 I see a new version came out
11-30-11. Are you all using the later 11-30-11?
Mikek

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their news
server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have in
the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated
with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who
works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when
there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple of
headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of the day
only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting headers
and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able to
search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume tagging
from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews couldn't
handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I
discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of groups,
and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This is a
pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will
download all those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of
course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've upgraded
certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price increases -
maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their binary servers to
what Xnews can't handle!

"Ian Field" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually associated
with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a friend who
works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has gone on when
there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of the
day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting headers
and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able
to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume tagging
from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews couldn't
handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I
discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This
is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will
download all those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of
course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've upgraded
certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price increases -
maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their binary servers to
what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds a
couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what email,
as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails regarding speed
changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that I would be
receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
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


Hi Arfa,

no I haven't cleared the problem up. I had a look at Avast and turned off
the real time mail scanning thing, then thought better of it and turned it
back on again.

To be honest, this is not enough of a problem for me to mess with turning
bits of the antivirus off. I expect eventually some upgrade will sort
things out for me.
I've only come across 2 threads where I noticed this anomaly, funnily
enough, this being one of them!
(Hence my initial belief it was a gag)

Btw, my symptoms are identical to the spoof reply I posted - the first
four (Marks, Rich's, Ron's and Lee's) replies all appear identical to my
spoof one, all others in the thread are normal.


Cheers!



Gareth.


It is strange indeed. You don't really have to turn the Mail Shield off
properly. Just select the "disable for 10 minutes" option to check if it
cures the problem. It just automatically reinstates itself after that period
of time.

Arfa

"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling
it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa
I sent our troubleshooting and solutions to Avast this morning.
Maybe on their next iteration they will fix it.
BTW, I installed my version on 11-3-11 I see a new version came out
11-30-11. Are you all using the later 11-30-11?
Mikek

I really don't understand computers to the necessary depth to say if one
method of fixing this behaviour is preferable to the other. I'm sure Adrian
or Lee or Rich might know. One of you lads care to comment ? As to the
version of Avast that I am running, it was put on when I took over this
machine, and it had W7 put on it, about 19 months ago now. I always install
any program updates that Avast says it has waiting, so it should be fully up
to date. If you right-click on the tray icon, and then open the "About
Avast" window, it will tell you the current version that you have. Mine says
that it is

6.0.1367 and definition set 120115-0

Arfa

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually
associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a
friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has
gone on when there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of
the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting
headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able
to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume
tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews
couldn't handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I
discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This
is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will
download all those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of
course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've upgraded
certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price increases -
maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their binary servers to
what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds
a couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what
email, as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails
regarding speed changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that
I would be receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa


I received one "Oops we're sorry we accidentally sent you an email" email,
when they hadn't actually sent me any emails.

How funny.

I'm actually very happy with my Virgin broadband, I'm on a 10MB package, and
most times I bother to do a broadband speed test, its in the 9MB and beyond
range.
Right now I've just got 9.6.



Gareth.

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually
associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a
friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has
gone on when there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of
the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting
headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set the
start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then able
to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume
tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews
couldn't handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until I
discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go. This
is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so it will
download all those headers in a relatively short space of time, but of
course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've upgraded
certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price increases -
maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their binary servers to
what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds
a couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what
email, as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails
regarding speed changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that
I would be receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa

I got an apologies for error email too.

And even if they did double my speed, they'd only cap my downloads for 12h
like they usually do if I actually used it!

I'm trying to get headers in Xnews now, the previous attempt with the
sliders pretty close together resulted in headers way back months into last
year but not making it up to today, I've moved the start slider nearer to
the end slider and double checked the end slider is endstopped - its up to
20% and going painfully slow!

"Ian Field" wrote in message
news

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about
them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually
associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a
friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has
gone on when there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of
the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting
headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set
the start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then
able to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume
tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews
couldn't handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until
I discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go.
This is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so
it will download all those headers in a relatively short space of time,
but of course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've
upgraded certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price
increases - maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their
binary servers to what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds
a couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what
email, as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails
regarding speed changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that
I would be receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa

I got an apologies for error email too.

And even if they did double my speed, they'd only cap my downloads for 12h
like they usually do if I actually used it!

I'm trying to get headers in Xnews now, the previous attempt with the
sliders pretty close together resulted in headers way back months into
last year but not making it up to today, I've moved the start slider
nearer to the end slider and double checked the end slider is endstopped -
its up to 20% and going painfully slow!



I've just had another weird thing happen on another newsgroup. One thread
I opened had the same kind of post just repeated by everyone and no actual
replies, but that post had come from the previous thread I had been reading.

I've now turned off the newsgroup scanning in Avast, and every post I now
open in that mangled thread appears to be OK, though the mangled ones I've
already opened do not get fixed. (presumably because they are now just
sitting mangled on my hard drive).

Cheers,


Gareth.

On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:34:41 -0000, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:


I really don't understand computers to the necessary depth to say if one
method of fixing this behaviour is preferable to the other. I'm sure Adrian
or Lee or Rich might know. One of you lads care to comment ?

Simplest would probably to just turn off Newsgroup checking in the Mail
Shield | Expert Settings | Main Settings. I can't remember the last time
I saw any malware distributed via Usenet, although I'd guess that the
"special" binary groups may have some infected files and/or trojans.


One thing you may want to try is to load WireShark (nee Etherial) and
examine the dialog when you attempt to connect to the news server. That
can give you some insight as to where the problem may be and what may be
blocking that port.

--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA

On 1/15/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers,
(this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily
disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa
I sent our troubleshooting and solutions to Avast this morning.
Maybe on their next iteration they will fix it.
BTW, I installed my version on 11-3-11 I see a new version came out
11-30-11. Are you all using the later 11-30-11?
Mikek

I really don't understand computers to the necessary depth to say if one
method of fixing this behaviour is preferable to the other. I'm sure
Adrian or Lee or Rich might know. One of you lads care to comment ? As
to the version of Avast that I am running, it was put on when I took
over this machine, and it had W7 put on it, about 19 months ago now. I
always install any program updates that Avast says it has waiting, so it
should be fully up to date. If you right-click on the tray icon, and
then open the "About Avast" window, it will tell you the current version
that you have. Mine says that it is

6.0.1367 and definition set 120115-0

Arfa

Thanks. I searched all through the program looking for my version and
couldn't find it.
I have the same version you do.
Mikek

"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/15/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, Arfa Daily 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers,
(this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily
disabling it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa
I sent our troubleshooting and solutions to Avast this morning.
Maybe on their next iteration they will fix it.
BTW, I installed my version on 11-3-11 I see a new version came out
11-30-11. Are you all using the later 11-30-11?
Mikek

I really don't understand computers to the necessary depth to say if one
method of fixing this behaviour is preferable to the other. I'm sure
Adrian or Lee or Rich might know. One of you lads care to comment ? As
to the version of Avast that I am running, it was put on when I took
over this machine, and it had W7 put on it, about 19 months ago now. I
always install any program updates that Avast says it has waiting, so it
should be fully up to date. If you right-click on the tray icon, and
then open the "About Avast" window, it will tell you the current version
that you have. Mine says that it is

6.0.1367 and definition set 120115-0

Arfa

Thanks. I searched all through the program looking for my version and
couldn't find it.
I have the same version you do.
Mikek



Same version here, except it auto updated about half an hour ago and now
definition set is 120115-1.



Gareth.

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
news


"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Ian Field" wrote in message
news
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"Lee" wrote in message
...
On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


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

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about
them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually
associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a
friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has
gone on when there's been a problem.

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.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of
the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting
headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set
the start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then
able to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume
tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews
couldn't handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until
I discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go.
This is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so
it will download all those headers in a relatively short space of time,
but of course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've
upgraded certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price
increases - maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their
binary servers to what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds
a couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what
email, as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails
regarding speed changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that
I would be receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa


I received one "Oops we're sorry we accidentally sent you an email" email,
when they hadn't actually sent me any emails.

How funny.

I'm actually very happy with my Virgin broadband, I'm on a 10MB package,
and most times I bother to do a broadband speed test, its in the 9MB and
beyond range.
Right now I've just got 9.6.



Gareth.

Likewise. My 20 does just about that most of the time. Right now, 19.183
down and 1.950 up.

Arfa

snip


I'm still working at a solution from Avast.
I don't think the "third party support specialist" has ever been on a
newsgroup.
So, I'm trying to walk him/her (Vojta Nekvapil) through that first. :-(
Mikek

Hmmm. You would think that they would have someone there who understood
usenet access, considering that there is a specific section of the
program,
complete with controls and on / off switches, for newsgroup virus checking
... d :-\

Arfa

That may (likely) found at third level tech support, if it exists and you
can get there. Generally first level is a robot (program or human).

?-/

I'm really not quite sure what is going on with Avast! at the moment. I have
had it on every machine here since it came out, and have never had the
slightest problem with it either missing viruses and other bad-arsed stuff,
or with it interacting badly with any operating system that I've had it
running on, or any internet, usenet or mail access programs that I've had
running. Now all these problems with usenet have started - and there seems
to be quite a few people suffering - and also, a few times in the last few
weeks, I have also had a problem - but only intermittently - with sending
mail. Using Thunderbird or Windoze Live Mail, when you try to send a mail,
you get an almost immediate error message spouting some garbage about the
server responding with an invalid greeting, or some such. You can try and
try resending, but nothing will persuade that mail to fly. Until, that is,
you do the "Switch off shields for 10 minutes" option in Avast! As soon as
you do that, and click "retry", off it goes, good as gold. Happened to me
yesterday afternoon. Turned off Avast! then no problem. And here we are a
few hours later, and I just sent a few emails from Thunderbird, with Avast!
fully switched on, and they all flew without problem. And no, the machine
has not been powered down, restarted or otherwise rebooted in the interim.
Strange ...

Arfa

On 1/20/2012 7:44 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


snip


I'm still working at a solution from Avast.
I don't think the "third party support specialist" has ever been on a
newsgroup.
So, I'm trying to walk him/her (Vojta Nekvapil) through that first. :-(
Mikek

Hmmm. You would think that they would have someone there who understood
usenet access, considering that there is a specific section of the
program,
complete with controls and on / off switches, for newsgroup virus
checking
... d :-\

Arfa

That may (likely) found at third level tech support, if it exists and you
can get there. Generally first level is a robot (program or human).

?-/

I'm really not quite sure what is going on with Avast! at the moment. I
have had it on every machine here since it came out, and have never had
the slightest problem with it either missing viruses and other bad-arsed
stuff, or with it interacting badly with any operating system that I've
had it running on, or any internet, usenet or mail access programs that
I've had running. Now all these problems with usenet have started - and
there seems to be quite a few people suffering - and also, a few times
in the last few weeks, I have also had a problem - but only
intermittently - with sending mail. Using Thunderbird or Windoze Live
Mail, when you try to send a mail, you get an almost immediate error
message spouting some garbage about the server responding with an
invalid greeting, or some such. You can try and try resending, but
nothing will persuade that mail to fly. Until, that is, you do the
"Switch off shields for 10 minutes" option in Avast! As soon as you do
that, and click "retry", off it goes, good as gold. Happened to me
yesterday afternoon. Turned off Avast! then no problem. And here we are
a few hours later, and I just sent a few emails from Thunderbird, with
Avast! fully switched on, and they all flew without problem. And no, the
machine has not been powered down, restarted or otherwise rebooted in
the interim. Strange ...

Arfa

I have also had a problem making my posts appear on the newsgroups,
but only on one computer, as soon as I did the patch for the problem we
discussed, no more posting problem. Both of my computers have Avast.
Nothing lately from Avast's "third party support specialist".
Mikek