Resolution:
There are several parts to this message.  The first part is common to all entries, and it is the time stamp when the message was written.  The next part indicates that system logging was enabled, and that the portlet was executing in thread 213.

The "Adding failure" indicates that there was some failure obtaining the content for the "Human Resources-&gtFinancial Snapshot" portlet in the amount of time that was alloted.  The read timed out before all of the content was collected and processed.  This could be caused by an outage at the content source, or network congestion.  

The last part, "Running count over window = 6" means that the failure count is getting incremented.  If the count had reached the failure condition set in the Portal Admin GUI, this message would have been followed by one similar to "Disabling category because max failure count of 6 was exceeded ......."

What does this message printed in the portal.log file mean? 2003 Jan 27 10:53:22:325 AM EST : [System][ThreadPool thread #213][][top-Human Resources-Financial Snapshot]Adding failure. Running count over window = 6