Application problem PAN stopped working

Thanks in advance. I am a new convert from W2k and so far I have no intention of going back.

I installed the PAN news reader and it was working fine. I left it running overnight and the next day the task no longer appeared at the bottom of my screen. When I try to launch PAN from the Applications menu I see a brief flash of a frame then nothing, just as before I tried to start it. I have restarted my PC and I have used the reinstall option from Synaptic Package Manager and get the same results. I have looked in all the log files and I don't see anything that looks related. I don't see anything that looks like a config file in ETC. If you can point me in the right direction to fix this I would appreciate it.