I aggree with Steven Balck that it will be useful for members to be able to rate messages like the MSDN KB articles. Why not keep the existing point system (it has some disadvantages, however it works!) and add additional ability to rate messages being not orignator of the thread.
If you add filtering ability to your search engine to show messages rated thumbs-up from above ... users this may reduce the trafic of your site when someone searches for a specific area solutions.

Btw. I have used this feature today - it is good to be able to mark the message you think was the thing you need.

****

However I have another problem - maybe it is for another thread... Sometimes I have a message that can be assigned to different categories - for example my recent XMLUpdategram question can be assigned to Internet/XML; Visual FoxPro/Visual FoxPro7 and to Microsoft SQL Server/... So that in such cases I create one or more messages which are similar... which leaves orphan threads in UT. Note that this is not typical situation - maybe less than 5% of the threads are of this type.
Keep this in mind and think whether it will be good to add ability to post message to more than one area (up to three for example).
When a member browses the new messages he/she should be able to see the message in only one area (to reduce the "noise") but with this approach much more members will be able to see a given thread (some of the members perhaps has SQL Server as their default forum and does not look at the Internet or VFP one)

Kind Regards