Reinitializing connections

[Victor S. Miller]

Starting about 2 weeks something rather weird has been happening when
I run gnus: if I have gnus connected to a news server and imap server,
and it's been idle for about 10 minutes, I can't reach the servers --
in attempting to do that gnus will wait forever until I terminate it
with ctrl-g.  What's even worse, is if I quit gnus (the first time
doesn't work -- I get some message about the imap connection), and try
to restart it, it can't reach either the news server or the imap
server.  However, if I quit emacs and restart it, it works fine.  Any
solutions here?  I'm running gnus 5.10.6 on redhat linux.

Victor