This is just a short note to explain why I turned off IntenseDebate: it just seems to use way too much memory on my server — I had to increased the memory available to my blog twice, and was still having issues.
Quite frankly, I don’t feel like I was getting anything out of using Intense Debate other than the ability for users to get notified automatically when I reply to their comments, and to get that minor feature I had to give them all my comments, and render the comments in javascript, and … yeah, well, I’m going to do without for now, and we’ll see what happens.
Just use the Subscribe to Comments plug-in for WordPress (http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/) if you want to provide that capability with the standard WordPress comments system.