Known Bugs

This page lists the major known bugs in the latest release of Agent or Free Agent. (All bugs listed here appear in both programs unless stated otherwise.) We are actively working on fixing these, and we'll notify all registered users whenever we release a new version.

Reorganization: We've been listing the bugs in rough order of importance, so that the worst ones appeared at the top of the list. But that makes it difficult to find new additions to the list, so from now on we'll be adding new items to the top of the list and including the date that they were added. This should make it easier for people to keep up to date.

Known bugs in Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99c as of 12/29/95

Watched articles re-retrieved [Free Agent only]: (9/28/95) If you mark a thread to be Watched and then delete the body of an article in that thread (either manually or by a purge), Agent will re-retrieve the body the next time it gets new headers for the group. If it's being deleted in a purge, then this will happen each time you get headers, since the purge mechanism will keep deleting the body. The problem is that the header still exists in the group, so Agent automatically fetches the body just as it normally does for headers in Watched threads. We fixed this in Agent .99a, and the fix will be in the next Free Agent upissue as well.
GPF or lockup retrieving headers [Free Agent only]: (9/20/95) We have discovered that at least one newsreader (Net2Net) posts damaged articles that Agent can't retrieve. Specifically, the References: field points to the message itself, not to its predecessor as it should. Agent goes into a loop trying to thread it and (sometimes) eventually gets a GPF (at 0001:4F93 in Agent .99b).
We fixed this in Agent .99c, and the fix will be in the next Free Agent upissue as well. Until then, the only way to recover from this failure is to do an Online | Catch Up With Selected Groups operation on the group that experienced the failure. (We've seen these messages in comp.os.netware.misc and comp.sys.atari.st, but they may be elsewhere as well.)
GPF after closing NetCruiser: (9/20/95) Agent and Free Agent can GPF if you shut down NetCruiser while they're online. We're not sure whether the bug is in Agent or NetCruiser, but you can avoid it by taking Agent offline before closing NetCruiser.
GPF clicking in empty article pane [Free Agent only]: (9/18/95) If you click the mouse in the Article pane before you've downloaded the list of newsgroups from your server, Free Agent will GPF. This isn't a problem once you download newsgroups for the first time, but it can happen before then. This bug is fixed in all Agent versions, but the fix won't be included in Free Agent until the next release.
Fixed-pitch fonts don't display correctly: (9/7/95) Some fixed-pitch fonts, including Terminal, don't display correctly when chosen as the message-body font. Courier New does appear to work correctly, so you can use it as a workaround until the bug is fixed.
Incompatibility with some Win95 video drivers: (9/5/95) There seems to be an incompatibility between Agent .99 and the Win95 video driver for the Hercules Stingray S801 PCI video card and other cards using the Advance Logic "Ahead A" chipset. The symptom is an Invalid Page Fault in the V631P.DRV module. This problem appears to affect all Agent and Free Agent versions.
Trouble upgrading from earlier versions: (7/17/95) Some people have reported database corruption when upgrading to Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99 from earlier program versions. We haven't been able to replicate this problem ourselves, but we've seen enough reports to recommend that you back up your Agent directory (if possible) before upgrading. We fixed this in Agent .99c, so you should be safe updating to that or later versions.
Spurious "Too many articles to retrieve" errors [Free Agent only]: (7/17/95) The server can sometimes mislead Free Agent into thinking there are too many articles in a newsgroup to download. This bug is fixed in all Agent versions, but the fix won't be included in Free Agent until the next release; until then, see the FAQ pages for a workaround.
Incompatibilities with some Winsock drivers: (6/7/95) See our Winsock drivers page for a list of winsock drivers that can't be used with Agent. That page also lists any minor compatibility problems with drivers that otherwise work fine.
Auto-expand sometimes doesn't: (6/7/95) The option to automatically expand threads when you jump into them doesn't seem to work if you are in three-pane mode and have the focus in the body pane.
"Lines" field not set in posted messages: (5/8/95) Agent doesn't set the Lines field (the field that tells how many lines there are in the article) when posting an article, because we thought all news servers added it automatically. It turns out that some don't, so any article posted through them will end up with a header claiming that it has 0 lines. The article text is still there and can still be viewed, but many newsreaders will display it in the browser with a line count of 0.
Editing large messages is slow [Free Agent only]: (5/8/95) Inserting text in a large message is slow because of all the word-wrapping going on. We're looking at ways to speed this up by being smarter about detecting the end of the text that must be re-wrapped. We fixed this in Agent .99c, and the fix will be in the next Free Agent upissue as well.
Possible incompatibility with OS/2: Several beta testers have reported that Agent doesn't run under OS/2 3.0 (Warp), while others report that it works fine. We're still investigating this, but we definitely intend to fix whatever problems exist here. See our OS/2 page for the latest information.
Can't display large articles: [Free Agent only] The message viewing window has a limit of 60K characters, and truncates any part of the message that exceeds that size. This affects only the display; all of the text will be there if you save or decode the message. We fixed this in Agent .99c, and the fix will be in the next Free Agent upissue as well. (Our current Free Agent release displays a warning message when this happens.)

To report a bug:

If you have found a bug that doesn't appear in the above list, please send us a complete description of the problem. Agent users should use the Post | Support Question menu item, and Free Agent users should manually send reports to agent-bugs@forteinc.com.