It's Official: Echo SUCKS

I've received numerous comments and several emails concerning the general suckitude of the Echo comment system. As one put it, "If you told me I'd be missing Haloscan . . ."

Now one entire comment thread, the one to this post, refuses to load for most people. I am unable to access the "moderation" function to look at and/or modify ANY comments at the present time. I tried to do an export of all comments (it's supposed to go to an XML file). The system tells me it's finished with the export, and the file is 12Mb, but when I download it, it's 48Mb and won't open.

I really don't want to go to the hassle of moving to another comment system. There are about 40,000 comments on this blog from the last seven years, and I don't want to lose them. I've saved all of them up to December, 2009 when I was forced to "upgrade" to Echo, but they're not in a format that is exportable to anything else commercially available.

This SUCKS.

UPDATE:

Now this is fascinating. Under Firefox I can get into Echo's moderation function, but whole pages of comments will not load. Under IE 8 Echo recognizes me when I log in, but tells me that I don't manage any sites, nor will it let me add this site to those I manage. As far as Echo's concerned, under IE 8, TSM doesn't exist. Yet I can see the comment thread to the education post. I can even click on the "admin" button and log in. It just won't give me actual, you know, administration privileges. WTF??