I have a couple of nnml groups for spam, one for caught spam
(misc.spam.dspam) and one for missed spam (misc.spam).

Over the years, there have been tens of thousands of messages in those
folders so, even though I've deleted them all, trying to enter them
always asked me how many messages I wanted to read.

Tired of that, I deleted them (C-u G DEL).

I quit gnus and looked through .gnus, .newsrc.eld, .gnus.registry.eld,
~/Mail/active and couldn't find any reference to them.

But next time messages were put in them, gnus seemed to remember the
huge number of messages that had been in there (even though message
numbers started at 1 again).

Where's the old value cached???

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | All the world's a stage and most of us
http://nwalsh.com/            | are desperately unrehearsed.--Sean
                              | O'Casey