Any more thought about how to handle the Shout Box?
I'm running 7.2 and am fairly confident the shout box was causing a "stickiness" issue on my board. Pages would sometimes be slow to load, and it would stick for about 30 seconds and then go back to normal.
Today, I turned the shout box off and the stickiness issue went away.
I think it's a cool feature and would love to keep it integrated in my board.
In the meantime, I'll look at some of the alternatives Gizmo posted.