When shutting down the forums, for whatever reason, down.asp comes into play. It seems it has an "expiration timer", or something. After awhile, the forum becomes live again. Is this so?
And, if so, how can one change that time ... to indefinite?
down.asp uses an application variable, the only thing that would cause it to "run out" would be if IIS had been restarted on your server, there is basically nothing you can do to prevent this.