Stan, this is a big problem for all of us that is taking a very long time to
resolve, unfortunately.
Ever since the SWEN worm began making its rounds, the MS servers have been
overwhelmed with email. Attempts are being made to divert this email away
from the servers. This has been going on for close to a week now, with the
servers being down or acting strangely over half of the time. I personally
am getting irked by this, but I take some comfort from the knowledge that it
must be a very difficult problem to rectify if MS itself cannot make any
visible headway. If would help the situation a lot if MS would keep its
customers apprised of the situation, instead of remaining silent, as this is
affecting ALL the MS newsgroups, as far as I know, and may be reducing
activity on the newsgroups to some extent.
When the MS servers are acting up, I switch to reading the newsgroup through
my ISP. In my case, (AOL) this just involves going to
http://support.microsoft.com/newsgr...LCID=US&ICP=GSS3&sd=GN&id=fh;en-us;newsgroups
in Internet Explorer. It is an inconvenient way to read the posts, but it is
not affected by the problems with the MS servers. I periodically go back
into OE and refresh the screen to see if the server is functioning, and
switch back to OE if it looks current.
One thing I have noticed:
When you get the "message has been deleted from server" or a similar
message, DO NOT click on any post you actually intend to read, as you will
have a harder time ever seeing that message again. Wait and hour, then test
on older, unread messages you don't mind deleting. Surprisingly, messages
that would have shown up as "deleted" earlier, will eventually be readable.
Don't ask me to explain why!
