Well, I can't seem to get Haloscan to work and their forum has been down for at least 24 hours now.  They have not replied to my emails and I see no indication they will be back up in the near future.   I did, however, locate a new comment spam module that I think may be effective.  The benefits of this are that I can keep comments on-site as well as get rid of those image verifications / math problems that are not only annoying, but have been crashing the comment board in the first place.  I'll keep my fingers crossed on this but, for now at least, comments are back up.