I have been using Agent to browse the newsgroups and Binary News Reaper 2 to download using NZB files under Windows 98SE. BNR2 is kind of flakey, so I'm always on the lookout for something easier to use. I just learned about Altbinz tonight and decided to give it a try.
I downloaded the latest version, unpacked it to a directory and double-clicked the EXE file. All seemed well and I clicked on the setup icon and proceeded to configure the program. I had no problems until I went to the Interface section. One of the options was to have the toolbar use icons and text, icons only or text only. I decided to move the config window to get a better look at the toolbar and Altbinz promptly crashed my system. There was no error, and I could still move the mouse, but nothing else would respond. I couldn't even bring up the Task Manager. I rebooted and attemped to run Altbinz again, but I immediately got a big error message with two buttons, Close and Ignore. I clicked the Close button, and Windows told me that the program had caused an illegal operation. I clicked the button and again my system froze, except for the mouse pointer.
I rebooted again, deleted the entire contents of the directory, then unpacked a fresh copy of Altbinz from the archive. Same result.
At this point I decided that Altbinz wasn't stable enough to warrant trying to get it to work again. For all the problems that BNR2 has given me, it has never crashed my system.
