BINGO! - Frank Whiteley from Greeley has very kindly identified the problem.
Yes, the rest of you can read the posts but I cannot. He clarified that the
problem is in the way OE default is set up, and I just had never noticed
this before as I had rarely done much with newsgroups until now.

It appears that when you have read a message in a newsgroup, the computer
remembers this for the number of days that you set into
OE/tools/options/maintenance/Delete news messages___days after being read.
Thus if you have set in 5 days, and you access the newsgroup 6 days later,
the message will have disappeared from YOUR computer screen - but not that
of other readers! Once they have read the message, it will then disappear
from THEIR screen the number of days THEY have set in.

Somehow my default had been set at "1" - not that I would have understood
what this meant until Frank clarified it. Bingo! Problem solved.

Fascinating - I had no idea this is the way it works!

Frank (and others) thank you for figuring out the problem. I hope this will
help others, too.

David Reed M.D., Boulder CO

"Neptune" wrote in message
...
BlankI hate to sound paranoid, but I had put on a posting asking for
information on oxygen systems. It disappeared after several days. I
reposted - same thing - was gone several days later. I then posted what I
thought was a nice bit of information and suggested preflight for the D1 -
same thing - gone after several days.

Frankly I was unaware that anyone could - either technically or
ethically -
erase someone else's post. Maybe this isn't what is happening, if so -
anyone have any idea what is? The messages were in HTML - should this make
any difference?

David Reed M.D., Boulder CO