Can no longer download

[fellowda]

I have been using UE for several years. All of a sudden, I can no longer download articles. I get lists of headers from my news service but when I request to download an article UE appears to try to get the article from the server but does not succeed. My news service says nothing has changed and no problems on their end. I recently switched to the 64 bit version but it worked when I first installed it. Any ideas?

[alex]

Check what is the error - tasks menu, task manager, then look for the red question sign tab (to the right of the "Articles" tab), click it you should see the error messages, also you can see them in the console tab.

If "No such article" means your provider doesn't have the articles, if "Authentication failed" means wrong password, if some socket error like connection refused or DNS error it may be router / firewall etc.

If the cause is not evident let me know the error.

[fellowda]

I don't get an error message. I have just discovered that it tires to download but never gets over 1 kbs and keeps creating sessions on the news server until it reaches the 32 session limit.

[alex]

does it finish those tasks on 1KB/s speed, no errors? then it gives errors when max number of connections is reached?

try to reset router / redefine UE in the antivirus/firewall definitions. also you may try to uncheck edit menu->general->keep connection alive, maybe some bug in a driver related to multithreading, but better to check it again after you find the cause.

[fellowda]

I reset the router, checked the firewall, unchecked keep connection alive, started a download and after 3 minutes, it has created 32 sessions and downloaded 0% of a 20 mb article. BTW thanks for your help

[alex]

Maybe connections time out and it retries them, try also set the number of retries for the server to 1 in edit menu->properties->servers, it should give some error in the end after read timeout value in eidt menu->properties->tasks (again you'll see the errors in the console / question sign error tab) unless it is some third party driver issue. Also doublecheck whether the server port is correct and the SSL check box is checked or unchecked as it should be.

To the right of the article tab there is the computer icon tab if you click it do you see any running tasks (if there are running tasks the icon is green)? By sessions do you mean those running tasks or the number of items in tha articles pane?

Also you may try to create a 3 day trial account on http://www.hitnews.eu (when I contacted them about spam posted from their accounts I noticed they give such an option without asking for any payment details). Does it work there or the same problem?

[fellowda]

OK, I tried hitnews and experienced the same problem. I tried to download again with the console displayed this time. The article I was downloading had 31 parts. Watching the console, UE tried to open 3 parts at a time, it would connect and only download .1 kb out of 660 before moving on to the next part. Watching the news server, every time it connected for a part it opened multiple sessions on the news server. Back to UE, it kept opening new parts until the connection limit (32 sessions) on the news server was reached and then I received the "connection closed unexpectedly by the news server" message. The bandwidth never got over 1.4 kbs. I have been using the default settings on UE for years and never experienced this problem until upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit. When this problem started, I was and continue to use the same default settings. I appreciate your help so far and hope you have (had?) a happy
New Year.

[alex]

What do you mean by console?

In the console tab (view menu->task manager) do you see any mishaps?

There must be some mishaps there, every time download fails it shows in red color the error message, every failed task will leave a trace there.

Can you email to alexbirj at gmail.com or give here some screenshots?

[fellowda]

Alex, my apologies for wasting your time. It turns out that it was the firewall. But why it would let the program create a session on the newsserver and then shut it down is beyond me!

[alex]

What firewall does is beyond application control, all UE can do is to display the socket error.

Probably it allows UE to open connection, but then it closes the connection itself ungracefully, so it remains open on the server side.