so, I have a several times a day site visitor who posts to the shout box something like this:

;lkajf;adsiya;tiht;dfiyt;altij'arektj'atliuqeiukfdja;k

I'll be getting rid of the box I guess, as I wanted to previously, but my question is this:

How can I track this shithead down? Any ideas? I'd just like to know the IP so I can ban it, at least.

My understanding is that the shoutbox works by creating a new thread in a hidden forum that you create when installing it. (All permissions are set to No Access).

Go into the Admin section,
Forum Management panel -> Edit or Delete Forum then select shoutboxpal (or whatever it was called when created). There you can change it so that Admin has read/write access.

Confirm the new settings then go back to your main page the forum is now listed there. It'll show 0 threads with 0 replies, don't worry about this, when you open it you'll see each post appears as a thread. Open the offending post/thread and you should see his/her IP.

Just noticed that if you mouseover the offending post on the shoutbox it gives you the IP address in a popup window.

SO you can forget all that I said above!