Hi sixbells,
Thanks for letting us know about this. I have never heard of the error message you are reporting so that is something we would need to look into further. If you are still experiencing this problem, I recommend contacting our customer support team using the web form on the following page of our site: http://www.auctiva.com/help/requesthelp.aspx
The sluggishness of your uploads could have been due to a number of things - most likely increased traffic on our image upload service or a slow down in the connection between your ISP and our systems. I'm not aware of any specific problems that were occurring when you made this post that would account for that behavior.
-Mike