Easynews is currently one of the sites that the proxies are affecting badly in many areas, there is a large thread about this in the easynews support group as you are probably aware.
Have you tried using a different port for your downloads (81) from the web.
Or using proxy.news.easynews.com for nntp using different ports ?
I found that manually changing my route made my NNTP downloads from Easynews using the standard port much better (
http://members.easynews.com:81/route/) Level 3 and Qwest are the best from NTL in my area.
Hope that helps
Ian