Vista and pop mailboxes

[#1]

Hi,
Does anyone know if there is a problem with vista and sending/receiving to pop mailboxes ie thunderbird or windows mail?
I've just recently upgraded to windows vista and last night decided to try to download my mails from plusnet to a mailbox on my new machine, i ran through the settings ( and have since chacked them at least 10 times ) but i could not receive any mails, kept getting timeout errors ( it never asked me for my password ), but i could actually send mails. I've tried switching the firewall off on my router, disabling mcafee internet security and also windows firewall ( although this has never been switched on ) but still cannot receive any mails...
Is there something else i need to do in vista to allow mails to download?
Any help would be appreciated.
Mick.

[#2]

I have been using Windows Mail for some time now with no problems.  Not sure if this helps, but my account settings are:
General: Mail account mail.force9.net/Include this account box is ticked.
Servers: My server requires authentication box is ticked
Connection: greyed out.
Advanced: Nothing is ticked.
As I am using AVG the POP3/SMTP settings are 127.0.0.1

[#3]

It's probably worth checking  your settings match those at this page.

[#4]

Thanks for the reply guy's, as i stated i had checked the settings numerous times, and these were correct, but i have now got it working, i actually uninstalled Mcafee and then it worked??? maybe the disable firewall feature doesn't work....god knows? but anyway, then there was a problem it took about 10 seconds to download each message, but i fixed this by disabling remote differential compression in control panel/programs and features/Turn windows features on or off... ( Just incase anyone else has the same problem )
But now onto my next and potentially worst problem..... I had set thunderbird to delete all mails on the server imediately..... so i downloaded all mails approx 400 into thunderbird, shutdown, then went back into thunderbird, and the mails aren't there....... at this point i started to panic a little ( well a lot to be honest )
is there any way to get these mails back? surely you have a backup and can restore emails?
I'm going to raise a ticket but thought I'd ask here also.
Cheers,
Mick.