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