I've revived my Jabber watchlist bot project since some nasty bugs appear to have been fixed in one of the dependent libraries. Basically you tell it which articles you want to watch and it will IM you when one is edited.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers/WatchlistBot

The more users testing it the better. If the freezing has been resolved I expect to keep it up 24/7.