I believe I've discovered the jammed thread problem...

[adrianpike]

I'm pretty sure it has to do with when links are included in a post.

I'm at work, so I don't have the time to check the code, but does phpBB verify links' DNS servers to ensure that they're valid links? It seems like it could be a DNS timeout error on the tapeop webserver, or something similar.

Edit; Seems like it's actually an image thing. If somebody's got an off-site avatar that takes a while to load, it's like it gets verified by the server or something. I'd get the first bit of the page source, but it would hang as soon as it started to display the thread contents.