I found a similar problem with OW, with the addition that it stopped talking to news servers as well. I tried different email and newsgroup clients and had no problems at all, so I took this as the last straw and stopped even trying to use OE...

I've also found that my connection totally stops responding after a random interval. The line is still up, but my PC can't find anything outside my home - no DNS servers, no nothing. This is all on a very fresh install of XP.

Bryan.