I believe I've found your problem. It looks like your using some software that is setting a ton of cookies. I spent about 2 minutes on your site and ended up with 25 cookies. An example of a few, none of which are set by
UBB.threads:
dummy+300+
dummy+224+
http://www.britbike.com/forums/ubbthreads+472+
http://www.britbike.com/forums/ubbthreads+994+
Here's what happens. Cookie specs designate that you may only have 20 cookies from a single site. Once that limit is reached, the oldest cookies get deleted. The cookies that are getting deleted are the ones that hold your User info for
UBB.threads. So once those are deleted they end up being treated as a guest user, ie. no permission to post/reply.
What could do, is possibly set that software so it runs/sets cookies on just britbike.com instead of
www.britbike.com. That way the cookies that
UBB.threads needs on
www.britbike.com won't be interfered with by the ones being set on britbike.com