I released vmips 1.0, finally. Sometimes you have to kick the code out the door, long after it should have left of its own free will.
I have been working on a race condition in WebNews which results in corrupted .newsrc files. I think I have a fix. It's kind of lame that the News::Newsrc perl module doesn't give you an option to set locks on newsrc files. I am contemplating whether to send in a patch.