The Case of the Disappearing Messages

["Mervyn Bick" <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With apologies to Perry Mason, I present the Case of the Disappearing  
Messages.

I'm quite embarrassed.  I have been punting Opera as the ideal news reader  
having used it myself for several years.  On the strength of my praises a  
fellow user on a few other news servers has started using Opera 9.51 and  
immediately come up with some problems.

About 2 weeks ago a thread he was contributing to suddenly divided into  
two like an amoeba. <g>  On my copy the thread remained intact.  He  
removed and reinstalled Opera, resubscribed to the newsgroup and all was  
well.

He has been cheerfully participating is several live threads with no  
hassles but today he started a new thread.  The message is on the news  
server but it doesn't show in his mail listing.

I had something similar a week ago.  I replied to a message.  The staus  
indicator shows that the message was replied to and a copy is in the sent  
folder.  The message is, however, not visible in the newsgroup list.  The  
message is actually on the server as I have checked with an older version  
of Opera which I have been running in parallel with 9.51.

Short of calling in Perry Mason, how do I and my friend un-disappear these  
messages?   Perhaps more importantly, how can we prevent this happening  
again without going back to OE?

Mervyn.