Spurious "Couldn't open server" message in 5.0.13

[Steve Baumgarten <sbb@panix.com>]

I have a single NNTP server I use locally, plus a couple of
publicly-open NNTP servers that I told Gnus about either via the "B"
command or the "G m" command.  

What I see happening now is that startup is fine, with the main server
contacted and active file and newsgroups read correctly; then the
foreign servers are contacted and are queried for articles.  All this
works well.

However, if I then try to select a local group (i.e., one from my main
NNTP server), I get a "Retrieving..." message followed almost
immediately by "Couldn't open server".  Reselecting the group fixes the
problem and things continue normally.

If I then select a foreign group -- same problem.  It seems that I
can't switch between NNTP servers without getting this error, even
though immediately reselecting the group/server fixes the problem and
allows things to continue normally.

The only time I *don't* see this problem is when I let my local NNTP
server connection time out, so that Gnus would normally attempt to
reconnect.  In this case, there's no problem.

The bug would seem to be in gnus-check-server; the error message
itself is displayed by gnus-select-newsgroup.  Possibly there's some
interaction between an already open NNTP stream and a switch to a
different NNTP server.  I haven't looked into it much further than
that yet.

I don't set too many Gnus variables in my .emacs -- here's the salient
one:

	(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.panix.com"))

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve Baumgarten
sbb@panix.com