I’m afraid that this sounds like database corruption. The cause of this is unknown to us at this point. Vienna’s database is located at “~/Library/Application Support/Vienna.messages.db”. If you backup your home folder frequently (which everyone should), then you can quit Vienna, delete “messages.db”, and replace it with a recent backup. If you don’t have a backup, there may also be a file “messages.db.bak” in the same folder; check the last modification date on that, and if it’s recent enough, then you can quit Vienna, delete messages.db, and remove the “.bak” extension to use your old database.

If you don’t have either of those things, then you still should be able to export your subscriptions and re-import them. Export all of your subscriptions, quit Vienna, move “messages.db” to a different folder, and re-launch Vienna. That will create a fresh database, and then you can import your subscriptions again.

Jeff Johnson, Vienna Developer on the cocoa|forge forum

Oh bother… Guess my Vienna database is corrupted. And I’m not one of those smart people making regular back ups of their home directory either.

This could be a blessing in disguise since I was not being able to keep up with my reading. I’ll take some time to clean out my messy RSS repository and start over. No doubt there will be a number of gems to links to…

Newsgator has just made a few of its products available for free:

• FeedDemon
  
• NetNewsWire
• NewsGator Online

This might be one of the only ways to easily and continously synchronise feeds between a Mac and a Windows machine. I certainly shall be looking into this option (despite the fact that it would mean I’d no longer use the excellent Vienna RSS reader for the Mac).