Yes I know I'm going to catch flack for this because I'm new to SEO, but... what exactly do proxies have to do with backlink checking? For example:
"Please note that we have temporarily disabled the ?Home Page PR? option so as to not put too much strain on our limited number of proxies."
"The new tool relies on an expanded base of proxies which give much greater speed by allowing the tool to check multiple backlinks simutaneously."
Ok yes dumb question here, but are the proxies being used for any type of anonymity purposes? Or is it simply so that more servers can run checks for links, like multi-threading in a CPU to make it faster? I'm assuming the latter.