Gnus sometimes loses track of which articles have been read

[Sean McAfee]

I read Usenet both at work and on my laptop at home, using the same NNTP
server from both locations.  My (possibly naive) strategy for
maintaining continuity across sessions has been to transfer my .newsrc
and .newsrc.eld files between my work and home computers.  Sometimes,
after transferring those files from one computer, I'll launch Gnus on
the other computer and find that it's lost track of which articles I've
read, with most newsgroups looking like I haven't read them for months.

When I say "sometimes," that might mean "every time"; I've only been
trying this approach for a few months, and I haven't done it that often.
I assumed that all of Gnus's state resided in the two files I mentioned,
and that by using the same server from both places, I could seamlessly
move back and forth between the two environments, but that's not the
case.  What should I be doing instead?

And while I'm at it, there's another issue with my little scheme that's
been bugging me.  I have several mail-based groups on my work machine
that don't exist on my personal laptop, and when I move the .newsrc*
files back and forth as described above, I see the work groups on my
laptop with asterisks in the "unread articles" column.  Is there a
better way to transfer ONLY the Usenet-related state back and forth?