Problem with MS Community Newsgroups?

[joeu2004]

Is anyone else experiencing chronic delays or failure when trying
to access any of the Excel newsgroups through "MS Community
Newsgroups" (MSCN)? How do I report such problems?

By "MSCN", I mean: I go to http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups,
log in, navigate my way to the list of English Excel newsgroups,
then select one of them on the left.

For the past 2-3 days, usually I get an error to the effect of "page
not available". But occassionally, I can get to the page (list of
postings) after a very very long time, sometimes just after getting
the "not available" error(!).

I do not believe this is a browser problem. I am using IE 6.0 and
Win XP SP2. I have had not problems for months/years.

I do not believe it is a local network problem. Obviously, I have
no problem posting to the same newsgroups using Google Groups.
However, it could a problem within my ISP's network. But it could
also be a problem within the MS network. That is why I am asking
if others are experiencing the same problem chronically.

 

[joeu2004]

Is anyone else experiencing chronic delays or failure when trying
to access any of the Excel newsgroups through "MS Community
Newsgroups" (MSCN)? How do I report such problems?

And "of course", soon after I post this inquiry, the problem clears
up -- at least for now. Actually, the problem persists when I do a
search. And the original problem might have been intermittent to
begin with, and I just had "bad luck". I am still interested in
knowing
if others have seen this problem (just in the last 1-2 days). And I
am still interested in knowing how to report such suspicious problems
to those who control the network for MSCN.

 

[Jim Cone]

There is a much easier way using Outlook Express.
Details here...
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm
or here
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/misc_tutorials/oe_ng/

--
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA
http://www.realezsites.com/bus/primitivesoftware

Is anyone else experiencing chronic delays or failure when trying
to access any of the Excel newsgroups through "MS Community
Newsgroups" (MSCN)? How do I report such problems?

And "of course", soon after I post this inquiry, the problem clears
up -- at least for now. Actually, the problem persists when I do a
search. And the original problem might have been intermittent to
begin with, and I just had "bad luck". I am still interested in
knowing
if others have seen this problem (just in the last 1-2 days). And I
am still interested in knowing how to report such suspicious problems
to those who control the network for MSCN.

 

[joeu2004]

There is a much easier way using Outlook Express.
Details here...
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/outlookexpressnewreader.htm
or here
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/misc_tutorials/oe_ng/

I am not interested in altrenatives. I am interested in confirming
the root cause of the problem and reporting them.

 

[joeu2004]

Is anyone else experiencing chronic delays or failure when trying
to access any of the Excel newsgroups through "MS Community
Newsgroups" (MSCN)? How do I report such problems?

FYI, with networking trace tools, I have confirmed that the problem
is indeed within the MS internal network or systems. When I try to
access a newsgroup, the TCP connection is established just fine,
and support.microsoft.com even ACKs the HTTP Get request. But
the Get operation appears to time out on the MS side, and 2 minutes
later, support.microsoft.com sends an HTTP 500 general error with
"connection: close". This misbehavior occurs at least 19 out of 20
times in the past 2-3 days. It is has been generally reliable for the
12-18 months before that.

MS support ("contact us") says that we should send such problem
reports to (e-mail address removed).