I've gone back to Pan (0.133 on CentOS 5.3) but now remember why I started using Thunderbird. For some reason Pan "times out" when I'm writing a longer response (maybe 2 or 3 minutes). When I try to send the response Pan just goes into an endless "Sending" loop. My work around is to copy and save my response, quit out of Pan, restart Pan and respond again (by cutting and pasting). It drives me nuts because I've got my newsgroups set up to just show unread messages and to mark all messages read when leaving the group..
My main news server is Motzarella (Charter doesn't work most of the time). But even when Charter is working, I think it does the same thing as Motzarella. It's like Pan loses connection (or, rather, is disconnected) and has no mechanism for reconnecting (until you restart it). Neither Opera, Thunderbird or KNode have this problem.
Is there a setting, or configuration option that would fix this? I love the way Pan is set up (I use the Tabbed layout) but this "timing out" is extremely irritating.