To give some more info, this new board we have was converted over from phpBB. At the end of the conversion, there were some errors given by the converter tool, but all the topics and users were there, and passwords working fine. We tested the new forum offline and it worked great. I'm not sure if the converter did something to the database that would cause any problems.
An alterantive would be to change the topics table to InnoDB.
I will look into this. Seems like a viable solution. I remember when we had phpBB though, the topic views were updating fine, and MySQL had no problems timing out the processes that were updating the topic views.
As for the cache problem, any ideas? I'm referring to this:
2. when a setting is changed in the admin/options menu, I get similar behavior... sometimes it goes right through, other times it tells me that the cache directory isn't writeable by php (confused - double checked cache directories)
3. I'm unable to disable the boards... the database is correct, but it doesn't seem to work.
Does this have anything to do with the fact that we are running the files on multiple servers?
Any further help on this much appreciated 