Recently active topics in Twitter tagged with twitterfox

I've just started using Twitterfox with Flock, and this evening it seems to not be working properly: the logo in the status bar has gone red and the tooltip says "Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 70 requests per hour". When I click on the logo to bring up the Twitterfox box, no tweets are showing.

Twitterfox is set to check for tweets every 3 minutes, so I'm not sure how it's making more than 70 requests per hour - but I did also have this issue when I was using Twitterific.

If it helps, I'm using Tiger 10.4.11.

whenever I try to log in from twitterfox or twhirl both state that "authentication failed with user "username"?!?

I'm trying to add the TwitterFox extension to FF, but once it's installed, none of my home pages will load (I have five home pages, one of which is Twitter). Using Twitter as one of my home pages isn't ideal--it needs refreshing to keep updated and I miss stuff because I'm working elsewhere. The perfect twitter application for me would be a thing like Twitterfox, a small popup from a toolbar whenever it's updated. Twitbin takes up the bookmarks area, and I need that! I don't really know what to think and I'm deeply aggravated because I like twitter and am finding it very useful but none of the ways to get to it fits my working style.

Is there another FF extension that works like TwitterFox I can try, or has somebody else had this problem?