Be more clear what you want to do.
Do you want to access the MS groups with an email client? If that's
the case, the simplest way is to use Windows Mail or Windows Live Mail
- they both have the MS groups pre-set and ready to run.
Here's an MS article about Windows Mail:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/mail.aspx
If you want to access other news groups, it's a tad more complicated
but it's not difficult to do.