For the login error (wrong password, etc.) and overall slowdown, that's probably related to our vB servers getting jammed up and failing to check your login information against the database. That should be fixed now.

For the chat itself, we haven't been able to isolate the cause of the problem, only that it seems to happen in the middle of the night, then seems fine during the day. It could be related to the automated maintenance scripts that run each night on that server...