I have released a new version of my Windows SharePoint Services RSS/ATOM reader. It now supports the two most requested features: items optionally displayed in a new window & optionally displaying item descriptions. As with previous versions, you may generate DWP files for use in SharePoint directly from my website or, for companies with tight security, download the source and perform the transformation locally.
For proxy servers & faster performance, I recommend downloading Wget to automatically retrieve RSS feeds from outside the company to a locally run web server. Wget can retrieve remote RSS feeds through proxies that require authentication. You can create a batch file that runs Wget against all external RSS feeds, and configure it to run as a scheduled task. Then, point msxsl to the local web server’s cached copy to generate the DWP file. In this configuration, WSS-RSS will retrieve the RSS feed from your local web server for display in SharePoint. You should also lower SharePoint’s cache time of WSS-RSS because it is retrieving the feed locally. Because the latency and bandwidth favor your local network, performance will be greatly improved. I will provide a downloadable sample shortly.