tharkun said:
But I have had it time-out on a lot of my posts before,

OK, I think that I fixed the time-out problem. To do this, it was necessary to remove all of the existing alerts. So you'll have to manually check threads on which you have been active, to see if there have been any new posts. Any new posts past this point will trigger alerts, but they'll be in the new format, where successive posts to a watched thread just append to the exising alert, instead of sending you a new one.