When I run Pan to download zillions of headers from newsgroups, my system slows the heck down, like to get running properly again I might have to reboot or at least leave my window manager (windowmaker mostly, though I don't think that has anything to do with this issue) and re-enter to get my speed back.

Anyone know how I can fix Pan or suggest another good newsgroup reader, also good for downloading mp3s and other formats of audiobooks?

I have 512 meg of memory, am running Suse 10.1, though I think the same thing happens in Ubuntu. I haven't found another newsreader I like so far.

As long as I don't run Pan, everything seems to work great.

I'm running the latest release of Pan.

I see that others have similar problems because there are so many headers. I don't have the problem in, say, Windows.

That would be 0.119. If your Help->About menu says something else, it's time to upgrade. Pan has been improved by orders of magnitude in speed and memory handling in the last few months.

As a side note, instead of using Pan to download millions of headers, why not use sites like BinSearch to create nzb files? Pan can download the files specified in an nzb (File->Import NZB).