Unfortunately, sometimes the ISP's news servers go wobbly (they don't
pay too much attention to them,as they don't rate them high on their
priority list) Even my ISP, who has won top Awards for service still
does it, except now, they DO service it in the wee small hours.

The only out here is to go http://groups-beta.google.com and wade your
way thru the threads :-(

-- "if you can see it coming, head it off at the pass, else put the wagons in a circle"
-- Please reply to this ng as:
-- my email adress is 100% faked to prevent proliferation of SPAM!!
-- Regards

-- Clarence Crow

I use Google Groups at www.google.com. It works with Internet Explorer
or the new Firefox 1.0 browser with no problem and is free.

JK,

If I had to guess, I'd guess that the problems were at the server end,
not in Outlook Express.  If the problems have cleared up with the AOL
news reader, you might try going back to OE.

I also use OE and have never had problems like that.  However I
did have problems like that with the old Netcom ISP and the WinVN
news client.  The problems were at the server.

I think what may happen is that OE downloads message titles and
keeps them on your hard disk.  Then when you try to read a message,
it goes back to the server to fetch the full message.  If the server
no longer has the message, you get the error message you saw about
"unavailable on the server".  If the ISP is having problems with his
news server, he may be routing requests to different servers at different
times, which have different sets of messages on them, and things
get messy.

An alternative is to try Heather's suggested free news server, or
Google, which is also free.  My experience with Google is that
they do a good job, but they used to be a little slow.  Your message
postings might not show up even on the Google servers until a
few hours after you posted them.  I haven't tried them recently.

   Alan