WSSoup 0.6a (c) Magnus Cameron 1995, All Rights Reserved. This file contains information that hasn't made into the main document yet. See the INTRODUCTION section in WSSoup.txt for information about what this utility is for and what it does. Quick release notes. This is version 0.6a. See WSSoup.TXT for information on THIS release. Version 0.5 was a dud - the news collection algorithm did not work properly. This version has had this part of the code improved substantially and it now works exactly as intended (I hope!). Hence the reason for this release to be on the same day as the previous release - yes, its been a busy day. Installation Read wssoup.txt. Read and change WSSOUP.INI. WSSoup will now send and receive mail as well as news. Make sure you take a backup of any important outbound files before running WSSoup in case there is a bug in the deletion of all outbound files code. The first time the program runs successfully, it will take some time (eg 10 minutes) as it downloads the listing of all available news groups. Just keep an eye on your modem lights and be happy if they are flashing regularly. You can prevent this from happenning but I am not sure that you really want to. To prevent it from happenning, create an EMPTY file in the CONTROL directory called LIST.DAT. Known problems Certain types of crashes will leave the program loaded in memory but with no visible user interface - the only way you know is that winsock.dll is still bound and you can't start another instance of the program. Depending on the winsock.dll you have you may have to shutdown windows to continue - if you are running OS/2 like I am then you can easily kill your WINOS/2 session - if you are running DOS/Windows then you may have to reboot. Shutting down the program is not really possible. The user interface will disappear but the program will continue running. You can expect to get some "garbage" corruption on your windows screen if you do this as the program continues to try to write to a window that is no longer there. No real *damage* will be done and you can look at debug.txt in the CONTROL directory for information about what might have happenned. It is quite possible that the program causes a GPF (General Protection Fault) - it is VITAL that you record all of the details of the GPF - ie, the module name AND the address, eg: 1fe2:21da. I can track down the exact line of code where the problem occured if I have the address. Better still, if you have winspctr, dr. watcom or dr.watson, make sure that they are loaded before running wssoup.exe and send any log files (text) that you can get out of these utilties if a GPF occurs. A number of files continue to grow for ever. You can delete the following files whenever their size starts to annoy you: CONTROL\debug.txt CONTROL\log.txt