I've only found on post about this issue on the internet. WSS 3.0 sp2 ( 2 server farm, SharePoint and SQL); when configuring an alert the browser hangs for 30 minutes and then times out. Nothing in the error logs. When I use telnet from the WSS server and connect to the exchange server over port 25 i have no problem connecting and sending an email. (the exchange server doesn't come back with any responses, so I don't know if that abnormal or not)
I found one post that said to run these commands:
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname alerts-enabled -propertyvalue false -url http://%1
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname alerts-enabled -propertyvalue true -url http://%1
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname job-immediate-alerts -propertyvalue "every 5 minutes" -url http://%1
but those had no effect.
Steve