The email every minute is probably the cause of your problem, just change it to ever 5 minutes to avoid the firewall, or ask your host to add your IP address to the firewall's "whitelist" to stop it banning you...
I'm not familiar with WP - no doubt Brian will be along at some point to point us in the right direction
But - If you upload and install a fresh upto date copy of WP to a new directory and then download the tables in the old database that hold the content to your PC, you should then be able to import them into the new DB.
I'm not 100% sure if it will work, it depends on your current DB structure and the structure of the new DB.
The only other (long) option is to install a new version of WP (as above) and then re-write the articles!
As I said above - Brian is the resident WP guru around here, he may know an easier / better way.