uidvalidity problems

[Bryan Ischo <bischo@plumbdesign.com>]

Hi all.  In a previous post I mentioned uidvalidity problems and was
asked to elucidate (I have not yet gotten a chance to try out all
of the great suggestions that were made for my various questions in
that email, but I do look forward to doing so, thanks everyone!) ...

Anyway, for a while I was OK but today I started getting the
uidvalidity problem again.  Here is what happens:

Basically, my "INBOX" for my main mail account, in which I receive
probably a hundred emails a day (I am on several medium-traffic
mailing lists), every time I try to read it, I get the message
"nnimap: Group INBOX is not uidvalid.  Continue (yes, no)?"
in my minibuffer.  Once I start getting this message, I will get it
forever until I remove my .emacs.eld (and my News directory) completely
and start gnus again fresh.  Also, one time I de-installed my IMAP
server and re-installed it (with a "enable workarounds for broken
IMAP clients" option set, to see if that would help), and that fixed
the uidvalidity problem for quite a while.  I thought that the "broken
IMAP clients" fix might have done it, but now I think that maybe it
was just because the IMAP server recomputed its uids or something
(I freshened the .newsrc.eld file and News directory at the same time,
so gnus got a new start at this same time also).

Anyway, it happened again today.  I was reading mail in my INBOX,
got to the end of my INBOX, with some messages deleted, and hit
M-g to refresh the box.  I got the uidvalidity message.  Perhaps
a message arrived at the same moment that I was updating or some
other kind of weirdness that confused gnus?  At any rate, it's
stuck in uidvalidity complaint mode forever and I will have to
clean out my gnus files to get it to work again.

A difference between this time and last time is that last time, I
was able to get into my INBOX every time if I just answered "yes"
enough times, but I did find out the hard way that the messages
as shown by gnus and the messages as existing on the server don't
necessarily match up when there is a uidvalidity problem ... anyway,
this time I can't even get into the folder because when I answer
yes, I get this:

Wrong type argument, number-or-marker-p, Re:

I am using Courier IMAP version 0.36b, running on Linux.
I am using gnus version 5.8.7.