Ack, again with the runtime overflow errors! Everything seemed so stable, but then I started getting the errors again (I had a sim running the whole time I wrote my last post, and it was up to about 178,000 cycles, but it crashed the moment I pulled up the "average sons" graph). I tried tweaking this and that, and I finally figured out, I think, what the problem may be, or at least one aspect of it. Like I said before, this is maybe a moot point, what with a swanky new version on the horizon, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Numsgil mentioned setting the veggie nrg to 4 or something low like that. What I didn't realize, until just a few minutes ago, is that the nrg value is overridden by pond mode. Now, pond mode is something that seems very interesting, so I like to turn it on a lot. Without it on, and with the nrg set to 4, things seems stable enough (no more graphs, though!), but with pond mode on, I get maybe 1000 cycles before things blow up.
Please to note that at this point, I'm not really asking for help or advice, as I'm hoping/praying/assuming I'll have better luck with a clean install of 2.4, but I thought I'd provide a little closure to my overflow topic. :)