Movable Type rebuild timeout

So, I recently got hit by a comment spammer, big time, and I need to rebuild my MT archives in order to totally get rid of the spam comments. Problem is, I have 4 years of archives and MT times out when rebuilding and I get corrupt comments. I realize that Dreamhost has a script timeout for a reason, but my question is, how do I get my archives rebuilt with this timeout in place? Is there anyway I can request a temporary "amnesty" so I can do my one big rebuild? Or has anyone else found a way to rebuild their archives in steps or something?

Are you using "MT-Blacklist" at all? I've found it to be a very helpful application for comment spam. There's a link at the bottom of the comment spam email that you receive that takes you to an administrative panel, and there's a pull down menu to select what action you would like to take (ie. delete message and rebuild). Much faster and no timeout issues as far as I can tell ...

http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/

I think you can change the number of pages MT will rebuild with each step in the config file. Maybe that would help?

Nice, that did it. I set it to do 100 pages at a time and it got all 1000 entries done. As for the spam, I just turned off the comments for all entries older than a month. That way, no one can sneak comments in on anything in the archives, and anything in the current month will be displayed on the frontpage and easy to catch.