George,
It was a combination of problems.
The server needed more memory, which I didn't realize until after I switched boards.
Our server is also old and crappy now also
When I had the ability to search ALL forums the server load would skyrocket. But it can handle searching by category just fine. I don't quite understand why it would be such a hardship, but it was. It'll search through 20 boards just fine but asking it to search through 31 was just too much.
Lastly, there is some code thrown in to the delete function that really slowed the server down too. I read some stuff on the VBB forums and commented out 2 lines and deletions work great now.
If your server has relatively new hardware (better than that Pentium 666 I'm running now) you should have no problem running VBB. You may want to disable the ALL search as well as trying to comment out the code if you find that your searching and deleting load up the server.
After you buy VBB you get access to the UBB import scripts. After you set up your board you run the script and it goes step by step and imports your UBB forums, users and layout for you. Pretty painless except for the moderator import. Any moderator with a space in their name didn't get imported right and I had to manually add them. Also, if you had a forum that was at one point private but is no longer private, the import script doesn't care and only tries to import those posts, so I had to do some fudging around to get that to work as well.
I'm happy with the VBB for now but I am going to have upgrade the server as soon as I can afford it so things continue to run well.
Hope that helps
!!! Visit > 
