> I'm doing much of this today but each time I download, I 
> am get a new copy of the entire forum and it takes 
> forever.  Is the product smart enough to only get updates 
> (new or changed documents)?
The problem is the HTTP update mechanism:
- each page has to be revalidated (that is, using a 
request/response sequence to the remote server). for small 
pages, it takes almost the same time as downloading again 
the page
- the *server* has to understand update requests. 
unfortunately, most forums, based on dynamic scripts, just 
can NOT handle this feature

There is no trivial way to speedup the process, 
unfortunately..