As I mod on another forum, my time is finite and I tend to cherry pick from other sites I use. I'm not going to slag yours off because I like the forum and people here, so I'd appreciate if you return the complement Ash, but there are thousands of posts here for a new member to look at and the search function (or limitation/lack of it) stopped me from going any further so I felt it easier to 'ask the locals for directions' than ride around aimlessly hoping I'll find what I'm looking for
The forum I mod on
http://www.mcnninjas.co.uk has a lot more traffic than here. We used to be on PHPBB, but encountered the same problems and crashes. We migrated to
http://www.simplemachines.org/ (SMF) forum software and the problem went away, and is a very stable platform by comparison.
Perhaps you might want to look into this if you have already reached the limitations of PHPBB as it will only get worse as we found out about 4 years ago