I haven't submitted a ticket to TAC yet about slow publishers as that hasn't been a specific issue we've had so far. All of our 4.1 clusters normally get rebooted about once a month due to Windows patching, but they too have issues when run for more then 2 months straight (changes not taking effect and other replication issues). Still, I was hoping for more then 3 months of up-time for the 5.1, but no luck.
I miss the Avaya PBXs now that we're going away from them. I had a G3si that ran 4 years but had a UPS glitch and lost power for a second. Otherwise it would be up for 5+ years. Same with the Octel it was connected to. If you could give them consistant power, they would stay up!