slow access/posting errors on maintainers forum?

[paperclippy]

I've been having this issue intermittently for a while but it's come back in force this week. I mostly post/read in the Living Maintenance forum and it seems like it happens more often there. There are a couple issues:

1) The Living Maintenance page will take forever to load/reload, even though navigating to other portions of the forums is snappy.
2) When I submit a quick reply, I get an error panel that says "The following errors occurred when posting this message: " but there is no text inside, just an OK button. This seems to happen more often if there are smilies in my post. On occasion I've managed to delete all the smilies and then it would go through okay.
3) When I submit a new thread or click on the "go advanced" button, either it will just sit there and spin forever, or I will be taken to an entirely blank page.

Any ideas? I'm using Firefox 3.6.12. Thanks!