Problems with MTAmazon

Some of you may have noticed that the Wisdom of Crowds post disappeared from the front page. I’ve been having lots of trouble with the MTAmazon plug-in that helps power the books section of the site. The basic problem is that the cache is somehow getting corrupted and/or the Amazon API is down and the site won’t publish if there’s a book post on the front page, which pretty much renders the whole site useless from an updating perspective. It worked well for months and now, poof, it doesn’t…without any changes having been made in how it works. Several others on the MTAmazon-users mailing list are having the same problem, and up until today, deleting the cache fixed the problem (as suggested), but even that doesn’t work now. With the caching mechanism, you’d think it would fail more gracefully than that.

Anyway, has anyone run into this problem and discovered a solution?