[OT] Weird "Get New Messages" on sci.electronics.design

If the number to fetch always has "1265" as a fixed part of the number then I'd suspect an issue with Agent. OTOH, I've used Agent for _years_ and haven't seen that kind of a problem. It is true that switching servers without "starting over" can cause all kinds of confusion but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

Couple of things you could try:

Scope out the headers in s.e.d for the message ID (the Xref line) and see if they appear sane.

Setup a sniffer (e.g., WireShark on a Linux box, linked via a hub (not a switch)) and look at the NNTP conversation between your box and the news server. Might be enlightening but will be more of a PITA to get running than just looking at the headers you already have.

There are local (on-the-box, under Windows) sniffers that could be simpler to use. Only one I'm aware of off-hand is CommView from

possibly mesage numbers are too high for agent? What are you seeing in the xref header?

possibly there are a large number of deleted messages and agent is having trouble dealing with that?

Before re-installing make sure that you have also deleted ALL data files.

...Jim Thompson

I was having the same or similar problem with Pan on Linux. I couldn't find a "purge old messages" anywhere in the menu hierarchy, so I decided to uninstall it, delete EVERYTHING associated with Pan, and reinstall Pan. Now it loads almost instantly, like well-behaved software should. ;-)

If you're using 'doze, you might have to purge the registry (one of the worst ideas conceived of in the history of computing, courtesy Mr. Bill.)

I've done that too; it's tedious, but it works. Start regedit, do an exhaustive search for "agent", and delete the whole entry.

Good Luck! Rich

Still thinking like a Windows user ;)

On Unix, uninstall and re-install will rarely do anything; it's usually a no-op (except for restoring files which root may have accidentally deleted). Most package managers will only delete files which were part of the original installation, and then only if they are identical (by MD5/SHA checksum) to the installed file.

If you think that a program's configuration or state is causing problems, it's the files and/or directories in your home directory which are relevant. In the case of Pan, that's ~/.pan (stable) or ~/.pan2 (beta).

Programs not distinguising between the program (e.g. C:\\Program Files) and data (e.g. C:\\Documents and Settings\\) is purely a Windows phenomenon. It doesn't happen on Unix. Microsoft introduced UAC in Vista to try to harass developers into fixing the issue, but it looks like they're conceding defeat on that front.

That was part of it...Thanks!!

After I deleted the next time I made sure all data files were gone, they were not so the new install must have picked up the same issue.

The fix turned out to be to delete the .DAT and .IDX files for this group, and them load all messages, but then one more thing, some how it brought back messages from 2003 from my last project that I really doubt were there, so I deleted them.

Finally I did a "Catch-Up" instead of a "Get All New".

Now Get All New works and life is good. Agent must keep things in a few places, had to get them all to win, in any event, it is working now.

Doing a catch-up is probably what did the trick. Sorry I didn't see your post earlier or I would've advised you to do that in the first place.