I've turned off quick links for everybody, as I'm more and more certain that it's strategic combinations of old-time, non-forum-marking-read people hitting the index page that's causing our mysql to end up stacking up.
FYI/FWIW, I haven't seen any of the oddities since you made that change. Seems like a reasonable theory to me! Thanks.
I uhhhhh forgot it was the first. All totals reflect any refs that might have come from today as well. At Aaron's request, everything's LINKIFIED! Please do not beat up the server. ;-)