I have been using Outlook as my Usenet news reader for quite some time
now. For the most part, I like it...it sure beat the Unix interface I
used in college some 13 years ago. But I just downloaded XNews from
www.download.com. It has some rather decent features and it's free. For
the most part, it blows away Outlook, though I find Outlook's watching
and flagging capabilities are a bit more to my liking.

The biggest surprise, however, is that for some reason I now have access
to alt.binaries.pictures.fishing. I know it's been discussed here before
and that there are a number of folks here that can't get to it...maybe
it's all in the reader (though I wonder if there's a parameter in Outlook
that can be switched to get the access...?).