getting Gnus running

[Lynn David Newton]

Esteemed subscribers,

Are there any XEmacs (or GNU Emacs) users out there? If
so, maybe you can help me figure out something?

I haven't read news groups since before I left Motorola
last July. When I was there I rarely did the last two
or three years, because we had an incredibly bogus NNTP
server that was down more often than it was up, and I
got out of the habit.

It's time to start from scratch. BTW, I'm on cox.net.
I'm having trouble getting Gnus to kick off correctly.

The NNTP server seems to be functioning. running

getlist -h news.west.cox.net active 

returns a listing of over 55,000 news groups, so it's
out there standing ready and waiting to serve me. I had
to do that as root, though. I don't know if the fact
that I can't query the server in that particular way as
non-root makes any difference.

I deleted all references to anything having to do with
Gnus in my startups (and think I did a thorough job),
removed my .newsrc, and commented everything out of
~/.gnus, except this:

(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.west.cox.net"))
(setq gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups "rec.running")

because the Info documentation seems to suggest it's a
good idea. When I run M-x gnus, the startup window with
the Gnu on it pops up, but it just hangs forever. It
does so when I try to start it with xemacs -q, too.

Does anyone know offhand if there's something obvious
I'm overlooking?

I can worry about customizing, configuring,
subscribing, and all that once I get it to cough up
some news for me.

The irony is that this is the sort of question for
comp.emacs.xemacs, but I can't ask it there because I
can't get to the news!

Thanks for any insights. BTW, for reference, I've been
using forms of Emacs since 1987, so it's not a case of
someone horsing with software he doesn't know how to
use.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ