Reading server hanging

[Victor S. Miller]

I'm running an old version of gnus 5.10.6 (it's a long story), and
everything had been working ok until a few days ago.  While doing some
cleaning up of my archived folders I managed to screw something up,
and I couldn't get gnus to start up at all.  Now if I do

(setq gnus-check-new-newsgroups nil)

Things start up sort of ok -- I can read my local mail and an imap
mailboxed from a server, but i can't get any items from the newsgroup
of my local server (news.nj.comcast.giganews.com).  If I try to access
any newsgroup, or even list the group by to a B and then typing in the
server it appears to hang up (I've even let it run over night).  Does
anyone have an idea of what might be wrong, and more importantly how I
can fix it (it would be ok if I could just catch up all the
newsgroups)?

Victor Miller