Just wanted to say THANK YOU, ChrisMan for posting what your actual resolution was.
My install started going really slow and even failing to "go" at all, running good for a few short minutes after restarting the web site/app pool. I looked at the SMTP server after reading your message and realized it had been stopped. Clicking the start button and now everything seems to be going smoothly again.
Hopefully this really was the culprit. Again, appreciate it.
As an alternative, maybe BugNet could be configured to use the pickup folder if it's not already? That way, sending a message will only be writing a file rather than attempting to send realtime.