A couple years ago I recommended Newzcrawler as my preferred reader of choice.
Newzcrawler was/is a good program but the developer tried to do way too much with the software and it had a number of nasty gotchas which ended up, well, getting me.
For the past few months I’ve been using Sharp Reader 0.9.7 which works just as well and is free. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.