myprius's dashboard

I have Windows XP Professional and have used Thunderbird with my provider, Roadrunner, for a long time. Recently, I am no longer able to retrieve my messages. The status bar shows "Downloading 1 of 74," so it sees the messages there. After a moment, I get an error message indicating that the connection with the server has rimed out. The odd thing is that I can still send emails. I reinstalled Thunderbird; that did not fix the problem. I compacted the folders; still no success.