more nnbabyl woes

[Allan Poindexter <allan@royal-oak.csc.ti.com>]

I have a series of nnbabyl newsgroups defined.  Below is a typical example:

("nnbabyl+clist:gnus" 4
 ((1 . 2)
  (15 . 16)
  24 112 115
  (118 . 121)
  127 139 148 152 157)
 ((expire 16)
  (reply 15)
  (tick 157))
 (nnbabyl "clist"
	  (nnmail-spool-file procmail)
	  (nnmail-use-procmail t)
	  (nnmail-procmail-directory "~allan/mail/.inboxes")
	  (nnmail-procmail-suffix ".c")
	  (nnbabyl-mbox-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/nnclist")
	  (nnbabyl-active-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/.active/clist")
	  (nnbabyl-get-new-mail t))
 ((to-address . "ding@ifi.uio.no")))

The only differences between the definitions of the different groups are:

1.  Different nnmail-procmail-suffix settings according to what category the
groups go into.  ".c" means a computer related mailing list.  ".a" is
administrative messages.  ".mail" is my main personal email etc.

2.  Different nnbabyl-mbox-file and nnbabyl-active-file settings to correspond
with the suffix distinctions.  (I toyed with the idea of one active file but
wasn't sure it would work so I decided to try this first.)

3.  Different group parameters.  Non-mailing-list groups have no to-address
(of course).  Some are auto-expire, etc.

After a couple of false starts (e.g. don't set nnmail-spool-file to
"'procmail" since the variable list isn't evaluated) this setup worked great
when I started it up.  Gnus quickly sucked my procmail directory dry and
produced the newsgroups in a most gratifying manner.  The problems started
when I tried to get more new mail.  The M-g command would return immediately
without getting any of the new mail.

I looked at the server buffer and there were two definitions of each of the
servers.  I deleted the server definitions that were writable and left only
one copy of each (a read-only definition).  This zapped the server-alist in my
.newsrc.eld but seemed to fix the problem.

It was not to be, however.  Soon the problem reappeared but this time there
were no double server definitions to blame.  Gnus would always read the mail
correctly on startup but at some indeterminate time afterwards it would fail
to see any new mail.  On a hunch I tried manually closing the server to see
what would happen.  Bingo.  It always reads the mail correctly when the server
is not already open and then fails after an indeterminate number of later
M-g's.

Does anyone have any ideas?  

In order to make my workaround more palatable does anyone have a suggestion
for having M-g close the server automatically before it tries to read new
mail?  I tried setting nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook in the group parameters
but that did not work.