Basil, I would check your error logs and see if you're getting and 403 requests, it's possible that the suhosin module on your server is killing the connection; it is also possible that your host has configured fsockopen to not allow connections to outside servers (generally done as a form of security, but really breaks things that rely on 3rd party databases).
As for the aforementioned error, these are generally covered in the
UBB.threads System Requirements Test, you might give it a run to see if there are any detectable issues that it can find with your server configuration.
