When I tried to hook up on Monday morning I couldn't get in at all. My connection "hung" until early Wednesday morning when my friendly ISP guy brought me a new modem - so I suspect that's not your problem.

The only "slow connections" I've seen here in recent months are always with a "waiting for AdServer" notation in the IE status bar at the bottom, so I assume it's traffic conflicts/collisions with the remote server that delivers the little Google ads. Usually a "refresh" will connect instantly, which probably indicates it's not high traffic; but if I don't "kick the tires" the hang may last last for a very long time - (probably on the order of ten or fifteen seconds) indicating a likely "packet collision" which is more likely to give you a "dead" link.

The ads are, I think, linked by jscript(?), so your NoScript plugin could actually be what's bogging you down. I find the over-use of java scripts annoying, but with current plugins the malware vulnerabilities appear to be reasonably well controlled, and so many sites are now using it for legitimate(???) purposes that it's almost necessary to have it available.

My "blockers" ask permission before allowing scripts from sites I haven't prevously approved; but then a quick click lets the script run - or not - as I decide. I've encountered a very-rare-few pages (not at mudcat, mostly at Yahoo "groups") that won't load at all without scripting. That's so very rude that I don't ever look at those pages.

John