In my opinion, the only freeware forums that is worth using is phpBB.  It's awesome and it looks cool too.

I think forums are old school.  Everyone should have a Voip/camera phone with conversation record so that it can be played back on my home theatre when I need to be entertained.  There should be scantily clad women that run around and feed me grapes.  (ladies, substitute your own preferred delusions).  But seriously, I am not able to get a preview of my posts, it just says fetching preview.  However, as you can tell by reading this the "POST" button works fine.

I like the grapes suggestion LOLOLOL!!!

I was moving towards a 'Women of Help Center Live' Calendar. .  but the grape thing was perfect.

Regarding the experience with phpBB -- I use the latest version of the phpBB2 which should be stable.  I used it for many months without problems on 2 domains but today I found out that one of these forums was hacked.  So I am thinking about using paid forum script.