Price fetch problems

[Fred Bone]

[GnuCash 2.4.8 on WinXP-SP2.]

I have about 25 securities for which I was trying to track prices using 
the "Get Quotes" function of the Price Editor. As they are all London 
quoted I use Yahoo Europe as the quote source.

Some months ago this stopped working. When you click the button it pops 
up a Perl process window, which stays completely blank for a moment and 
then goes away - at least it does when it's working. What I found was 
that it would appear and just sit there forever. Task manager shows that 
the process is using no CPU time, which suggests it's waiting for 
something that won't happen.

Experiments (turning the get-quotes flags on and off) indicated that any 
six quotes can be fetched but adding a seventh causes the hang. (I 
obviously haven't tried all the possible combinations, but ...). Oddly, I 
can successfully add a seventh provided it's a nonexistent one (I have a 
few old entries for companies that have been de-listed), but adding one 
more nonexistent one brings the problem back. This suggests to me that 
the problem may lie in interpreting the results rather than presenting 
the request.

Does anyone else recognise this problem? Can anyone suggest how I can get 
some useful diagnostic info?

I can no longer remember whether the problem came with a new version of 
GnuCash, or not.