The live chit-chat has its minuses also (besides the obvious pluses). Right now I ALWAYS use search before I post a new thread. In most cases I'm able to find previous post that helps me with my problems. With live chit-chat many people would try to solve their problems using the chit-chat what means that the search would no longer find it. And I don't think it would be a good idea to store live chit-chat conversations in a database for further references because it would take so much space that it would be just insane to do it. I think that the way these forums are running right now is the easiest way to get help fast (using search option) without waiting for response (sometimes it takes a long time and we all know that the problem has to be solved fast).

Just my $0.02