gnus hangs on entry

[lconrad@gamesville.com]

I seem to have managed to screw up my gnus structure, and I'd rather
fix it in a kosher way than just make a wild guess.

Unfortunately, this is a sob story rather than a bug report, because I 
lost most of the relevant data even if I were on my home machine, and
I'm sending this from work since I can't get into gnus at home.

This is pgnus 0.98 on xemacs 20.4 running on Mandrake LINUX 6.0.

Sunday night, my machine as a whole hung, and I rebooted via the reset 
switch.  It turned out that I needed to run fsck manually on the
partition with my Mail and News directories, and I answered yes to a
bunch of questions about fixing things in those directories, which I
don't remember any details about.

When I went into Gnus after doing this, it asked me did I want to use
the backup .gnusrc.el file, and when I said yes, it gave me an error
message.  So I said no the next time, and when I got into gnus there
were a lot of messages marked as unread which I had seen before, but I
could just catch most of my groups up without looking at them, so it
wasn't a major problem.

Last night, I don't remember doing anything I don't do all the time,
but xemacs got in a state where its window was completely blank.  No
menus, no icons, no modeline, no text.  Just a blank window.  I went
to bed.  When I woke up in the morning, it was still like that, so I
destroyed the window and started xeamcs again.

This time, when I tried to get into gnus, I not only got the lisp
error when I said to use the backup file, but I never managed to get
into gnus when I said not to.   I got all the usual messages in the
mini-buffer about checking the servers and reading the active files,
but then instead of showing me my groups, it just stops.  This
happened several times, both with xemacs and xemacs -nw.  ^G does not
interrupt it; the only way to stop it is to kill xemacs.

So my questions are:

        Was anything I describe above a particularly stupid thing to
        do, and if so why?

        What should I do now?

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad@world.std.com , http://www.world.std.com/~lconrad/ )
(617) 661-8097	fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139