Well that was “fun”. The good news is everything is working pretty much as I had hoped. The comment code is more readable and a length that seems reasonable. No more crashes or unhandled exceptions being thrown around.
Here are the properties set on Migual's component:
<cc1:HIPControl id="HIPControl1" runat="server" TextPattern="Horizontal" TextColor="Red" CodeLength="4" RandomCodeLength="False" TextPatternColor="Firebrick" TrustAuthenticatedUsers="True" ValidationMode="Forms" PersistDotTextComments="True" ImageWidth="120" ValidationIgnoreCase="True" AutoRedirect="False"></cc1:HIPControl>
The major crashes were occurring due to a default ValidationMode being ViewState; Forms just works better. All this came to pass by setting .Text up as a debuggable solution in Visual Studio. Not hard, just time consuming, but it turned out to be a good thing. For whatever reason, if you clicked on an article's feedback link (that links directly to the comments section of a post), the image would not come up. If you went just to the article, the image would come up fine. So I changed .Text to not display the section link and just the text. Problem solved for now.
My only other request is to allow a ValidationControl to be used with this component. That would flow nicer with the rest of the control layout. Maybe he'll send me the source code (nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)