Seriously, that's the only way I've found to speed Xnews up. The only other free usenet programs I know of are BNR (Binary News Reader) which has a crappy interface and GrabIt which has a "large groups" bug. With GrabIt, any group with a lot of articles, like a.b.x or a.b.dvd just won't show the articles after updating. You either have to use binsearch.info to create an nzb or you have to update the group in chunks through GrabIt. I use binsearch right now to create an nzb file. The only problem with this is that you can't browse the group. You have to know what you're looking for in order to find anything.I think Newsbin is a better program, but it's not free and I've had no experience with it.