Mike, as I recall the "lockups" seemed to occur about the time the Search function started crashing the board. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that they were related - and if so, the chat function should be okay now. What I recommend is that you respond to him telling him the above, asking him to give it another go this year, and let us know how it functions for him. If it's still a problem, we can look into another solution.
And I may be wrong, but wasn't there a problem for folks who had an older version of the Jave Runtime? I seem to recall Dave mentioning on more than one ocassion that folks who had problems needed to be sure and upgrade their Java. In fact, I seem to recall that he posted the link to the Sun site for the update. So, you may want to suggest that, as well.
