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After the Y2K rollover, slrn produces this message upon startup: ----------- slrn 0.9.4.3 (Sep 16 1998 00:18:17) Reading startup file /usr/lib/slrn/slrn.rc. Reading startup file /home/user/.slrnrc. Connecting to host news.host ... Connected to host. Posting Ok. Checking for new groups ... .jnewsrc.time appears corrupt. I expected to see see: NEWGROUPS yymmdd hhmmss GMT I will patch the file up for you. Checking news via active file ... ------------ The .jnewsrc-time file contains: NEWGROUPS 1000214 212945 GMT As you can see, the year has rolled over to three digits, confusing slrn. Slrn fails to "patch the file". This bug seems to have been fixed in newer slrn packages that come with Red Hat 6.0 and Red Hat 6.1; those versions patch the file correctly. So, the fix would be to backport the latest slrn package to Red Hat 5.2, and perhaps 4.2 if the bug exists there as well.
It's fixed in the current release, probably won't be backported. I believe the main cause is that your news *server* is actually sending back broken data.