WinVN is a UseNet News reader for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95 (a.k.a. Windows 4.0 or Chicago) and Windows/NT (Note: NT compiled versions are available for most common variants, the source is generally easily transported to others). It's name stands for Windows Visual Newsreader. It can be used to select, view, write, sort, and print UseNet News articles. Articles can be saved locally, cut into the Windows Clipboard or forwarded to other individuals via E-mail.
WinVN offers a more visual approach to reading News than most other news readers. WinVN allows the user to easily navigate between newsgroups and articles via its point and click interface. It allows the viewing of multiple articles simultaneously and on multitasking systems such as Windows/NT, it even allows multiple simultaneous news server connections.
Best of all, it is absolutely free and has a large number of folks who spend a lot of their precious free time adding features and fixing bugs...
What, it has BUGS!... Yes, most versions of WinVN have some problems. 99% of them are very minor. Also, the life span of any bug is on the order of 30 days (MUCH less if critical). You should understand that unlike commercial products which are fairly static and only have versions come out every 12 to 24 months or so, WinVN is a very dynamic program. Versions are being released with new features and fixes as rapidly as the code can be written, tested, and combined. To paraphrase an old weather saying: If you don't like WinVN's features, wait a month and it'll have changed.
(For anyone who's lost about what UseNet News is, get the WinVN manual (See section I-8). It has a good discussion on this topic which is beyond the scope of this document.)
[Paraphrased from the WinVN Users' Manual Overview section. Jim Dumoulin, Mark Riordan, et. al. with stuff from Sam Rushing and others thrown in]