Usenet Explorer

noone has anything against it?

i'm thinking to make them separate, so they won't be confused (well they will look the same anyway ) and you can see everything, shorcuts can be defined to switch bars on/off, also they will be easily customized, e.g. if you usually look for subject you can leave only the subject edit box etc., i'm thinking even to make "subject" "author" words removable too so you can have a short edit box when you know what it is.

Let's try I would say. Maybe even resize the fields so everyone can use their screenwidth optimal?

No doubt this will work perfectly.

How more flexible the GUI is, the better I would say

Looking at the GUI, I don't think there would be any problem with this at all.

My only question is whether these changes (and other configuration) are portable through some current configuration file used by UE? In other words, can I copy a config file from one machine to another (or just to make a back-up) and transfer or restore all customized settings? This would include server and group properties as well as column width, etc.

It might be nice to make such customized changes portable by export/import (or config file replacement), not only for the convenience of users, but also for support on your end, Alex. If problems crop up with so many customizable changes, it would be a lot easier for you to reproduce problems on your end if you could easily reproduce the GUI changes made by users.