Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE wrote:
The unread message count that you see before entering a group is only
an estimate based on the message IDs. It will be thrown off by any
unused IDs.

What I find happens is that messages aren't being downloaded, so the unread
count is correct but the messages don't appear. This has happened two or
three times before over the last few years, on different news servers, so
I'm inclined to think there's some long term bug here.

Spelling check will not work on parts of a reply interspersed between
parts of the original if spelling is set not to check quotes.

Yep, I disabled this. It's set to check everything. In fact I ran spell
check manually and it told me all was OK when it wasn't. I typed in a bunch
of rubbish just to double check I wasn't going mad. Curiously though it
seems to be working again, so hopefully that was just a blip.