News servers are designed for intermittent activity. You connect,
download some headers, read a bit, download some articles, read a bit,
etc. You keep an open connection during this, so as to avoid the
overhead of establishing a connection for each article. But the server
has to eventually disconnect idle sessions to avoid overload. This
tends to be about a 5 to 10 minute idle time. The news server
administrator sets this disconnect time.

So what you are seeing is normal.

--

Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm


"Mac" wrote in message
...
I use outlook express 6 to access newsgroups.
If I don't use it for a short while but still minimized on my DSL
connection.
Sometimes when clicking on a newsgroup nothing happens and at times it
says it's timeout or cannot access server or just nothing happens
until I
click on another newsgroup, then all seems fine.
Does outlook express go to sleep and needs to be woken up?

Mac