Usenet Explorer

Let me start by saying that I have not had ANY problems at all what-so-ever with UE. It has been a truly wonderful piece of software.

However, imagine my surprise when I updated to 1.7.1 a few days ago and had this problem yesterday. I did what I always do which is every few days I do a "Compact & Free" and then exit the program. No problem, everything is fine. I load the software several hours later (computer wasn't doing anything else, just sitting idle) and BAM!!! All of my folders are empty (the newsgroups are now outside the folders), 95% of the newsgroups no longer have a servers attached to them, the "collections" default option somehow got reactivated BUT, the data inside the newsgroups was intact.

So, I moved all the newsgroups back in to their respective folders and attached the servers to the newsgroups again. Everyhing seemed okay. Then I went to get New Headers for several newsgroups and UE went out to lunch (so to speak). What would normally takes a few minutes, was taking a LONG TIME. I start looking at things and come to find out, for some reason, UE is now downloading EVERY header in each newsgroup, some going back years!!! OUCH!!!

ANybody else had this happen or any ideas what might have caused it?

Did you try restoring your reg.dat backup? Check Properties->General->Miscellaneous->Settings backup is selcted. This creates backups of the most important files and are located in the '%UE%\Database\Settings' directory. Restoring reg.dat should put your groups tree back to normal.

As to the other problem - one for Alex to answer. I can suggest you check your retention settings for header retrieval, though.

compact&free doesn't have anything to do with settings, when you exit the program it saves settings (including newsgroups, servers, header ranges) as you see them.

do you have settings backup in properties->general checked?

if you see settings corrupted you still have an opportunity to reuse the copy of older settings, but you shouldn't restart the program too many times and make the settings directories backup first since those older settings files are shifted. basically you rename reg.dat.old to reg.dat etc, read in the help notes on the home page about settings backup.

but when settings backup in properties->general is checked the probability of corrupted settings is negligible even in the case of sudden system lockup.

try also to check disk for errors, ensure you don't run anything that may mess with file system (if antivirus don't scan the files in the settings directory, there is nothing there that may contain any virus, also third party defragmenters may cause problems as well).