The version is 0.123 ... from FC6.

 PAN has started going into Offline mode a lot, the GA release of PAN with FC6 didn't have this problem.
 My guess is that it's releated to the way giganews enforce connection limits (they return 480 auth. required if you go over 4 connections). Just ignoring this error, in this case, is probably the best solution. Is it easy to say something like:

1. If got 480 auth req.
2. and already connected to server.
3. wait X seconds ... and try again.

 Which probably means that a recent change to PAN made it go over the connection limits for short periods of time, not that you changed the error handling. So just fixing that limiting slip should also fix it.

 I've currently worked around this problem by limiting PAN to 3 connections for giganews (however this is suboptimal, and if PAN slips up twice I'll have the same problem ... limiting to 1 or 2 connections would be very annoying).