snaaaawwk... pheeeeeeeww </cartoon snores>

this thing is absolutely glacial over broadband -- I pity dial-up users!

part of the problem is on my end: I use Apple's Safari browser and for whatever reason any vBulletin 3-based system is terribly slow with it, possibly due to over-reliance on Javascript (where Safari is very, very weak; e.g. www.startribune.com comesup instantly with Firefox and takes up to a minute with Safari). Firefox (Mozilla) is better, but while once the page loads things are snappy, waiting for it to load, well... empires rose and fell, contintents drifted, the 9-11 commish is still waiting for Condi and George to testify, etc.