Was it just on my end or has there been a problem getting onto the forums?

No, you are not alone, I also experienced some problems accessing the forums from late afternoon on the 17th until early evening on the 18th, and this is GMT of course. Anyone have any ideas as to what happened? It doesn't really matter anymore; it seems that the TS Staff managed to fix the problem, well done to a prompt solution :grinthumb .

Yeh, I'm sure glad we are back on. I spend a lot of time here. I kept thinking I had screwed up my firewall settings, or even Spybot or Ad-aware had screwed something up.

I know that a couple of other sites linked the Audigy 2 review and there were a lot more people on the boards, I figured that might have had something to do with it.

Julio talks about it here:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4663