The only problem I have with their newsgroups are lack of (english) content that I like or am into!
Guess I really have to save up for a pay as you go credit card & move over to gigganews
OP: are you sure you was trying to download stuff from virgin's servers and not from usenet search?
I have done that a few times by mistake, and the problem was that it trys to download from your default server (our case, news.virginmedia as apposed to usenet's servers) and this is where I find I get the "Article not found" error
HTH