I have a suggestion. A friend (well, actually is was some dude in yahoo checkers that was proud of the demonic cult he was in) gave me the link to a free boards site. it is...
www.proboards.com
You'll have to do some searching to get to where you need to be but, it's free and i'm pretty sure i'ts stable. However, there are GOBS of ads and all you have to do is donate like, 7 bucks and you get 50,000 sites free of ads, I don't know what that means but I guess you won't get ads for a while. The board setup is strange and some things don't work the way they do for VBull.
But the setup is nice and clean.