Are you positive you had the auto response set up correctly? I've never set up auto response myself, so I'm just going by what I've seen in here before. The biggest problem I've seen people have is with the timing, people have often mistaken the amount for time the auto responses would be set for the time for them to start. By that I mean, when people chose 2 hours, they thought they would go into effect in 2 hours, not that they would go into effect immediately and expire in 2 hours. Just throwing it out there to make sure you hadn't made an error like that when setting your auto response up.
