In my experience, iJournal occasionally loses its brain when it tries to connect to the server and fails or times out. The LJ servers have been heavily loaded recently, while we continue to wait for new servers to arrive, so this condition may occur now more than it has in the past.

So two things that might help are

a) Turn off friend checking, or reduce the frequency, so iJournal makes fewer requests and thus has fewer opportunities to lose its brain.
b) Get a paid account, so you have access to the less loaded pool of servers, so fewer of iJournal's connections will fail - LJ's current performance is abnormally low and will improve within weeks, but it'll always be the case that paid users get better and more reliable performance than free users.

I'd be surprised if this were a X.2 issue - more likely that your upgrade to X.2 happened to coincide with a downswing in LJ server performance.

Is this stuff happening (well, the last 3 things, anyway) consistently, or only after iJournal has been running a while with Friends notification turned on?

I stopped using notification, and that seems to have stopped all of those problems for me. I haven't been able to track down the bugs in the source, though, to be able to fix it.

As for the slow startup, I haven't experienced that one; it could be that versions built before Jaguar was released have problems under Jaguar?

Agree. The slowness is unbearable, and now we only have a weird little square animated thing to tell us it's trying to do something, rather than some kind of progress bar that tells us what it's doing. I can't believe it needs to use the wait cursor so much, especially while it's logging in to LiveJournal or whatever. I'd like to just be able to start using it, heh.

I agree, I think that threading would really be the right thing here and getting rid of that funny square (truncated progress bar?) would be great. A jaguar wait icon would look very good right in that space. Aside from that, before we get options for "smart quotes" (see below) I'd really like to see the hardcore usability issues (network code, responsiveness, etc.) cleaned up.

As a sort of sidenote, judging by all the CVS commits lately, I think there might be an update on the way... bout time ;)

I've been using iJournal to post my notes (on 10.2.1) from the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference - the only problems I've had I've attributed to problems in the AirPort network.