Well, things got worse and eventually my internet connection collapsed as well. After several hours hair-pulling out, I tried this program

 http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winsockxpfix.html

 and everything came back to life. Seems it was a corrupted registry entry.  Thanks for listening to my cries of woe ;)

It doesn't even crash in the usual way with an error window, the program just vanishes from the screen. My web & ftp programs connect to the net OK and I've used telnet to test the smpt connection. My other PC (sharing a small broadband router) has no such problems. Before the problem started I'd upgraded my latest AVG antivirus files, then ran spybot and ad-aware. I've rolled back the changes on the latter without luck.

I've tried with and without the windows firewall. I reinstalled pegasus over the existing version, no joy. I've looked for corrupt and zero byte files and deleted them.  Can anyone give me a pointer as to identifying the cause of this problem? It may well be some other system problem that is causing pegasus to self-destruct, but I don't know how or where to start looking.

 I've used pegaus for years and am very happy with it, so I don't want to be forced onto an alternative package.

Any pointers much appreciated!

[quote user="nick robinson"]

It doesn't even crash in the usual way with an error window, the program just vanishes from the screen. My web & ftp programs connect to the net OK and I've used telnet to test the smpt connection. My other PC (sharing a small broadband router) has no such problems. Before the problem started I'd upgraded my latest AVG antivirus files, then ran spybot and ad-aware. I've rolled back the changes on the latter without luck.

I've tried with and without the windows firewall. I reinstalled Pegasus Mail over the existing version, no joy. I've looked for corrupt and zero byte files and deleted them.  Can anyone give me a pointer as to identifying the cause of this problem? It may well be some other system problem that is causing pegasus to self-destruct, but I don't know how or where to start looking.

 I've used Pegasus Mail for years and am very happy with it, so I don't want to be forced onto an alternative package.

Any pointers much appreciated![/quote]

This kind is error with the program "just going away" means that some other program crashed when WinPMail was talking to it and the OS closed WinPMail to stabilize the system.  You need to start turning thing off that are running in the background until you find the one that's starting the problem.  It's possible you might see something in the event viewer application log that gives an idea of what's happening.

I've looked in the events view and found the following nugget;

Faulting application winpm-32.exe, version 4.4.1.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x019934ab.

The events log doesn't show *any* event when pegasus simply dies, but the above when a crash window has appeared.
 

I've been trying to think who/what pegasus talks to when sending mail but aside from the anti-virus I can't think of any. Nothing unusal seems to be runnign through task manager processes. It's so darn frustrating. You'd think there were more sophisticated windows monitoring systems that might give a clearer clue to the problem.

 It's now giving a formal crash window whenever I send OR recieve, with or without firewall and antivirus. I've used task manager to exit almost every conceivable running process, no luck. Strange that it automatically downloads waiting mail without problem, but when I poll for new mail, it dies.

 When pegasus loads, there's a perceptible pause before the screen becomes "live", which didn't happen before. Sorry to be a pain, but I've really run out of ideas.