It's quite obvious that the ads slow down loading, but if you allow them, as I generally do, they shouldn't have a significantly different impact whether you load a short thread, a 50 post segment of a long thread, or an entire reasonably long thread, since the ads only open ONCE for each new opening, regardless of the length of the download. Loading the ads once, and adding a couple of hundred posts to the actual thread length shouldn't be a really major hit on total loading time.

I use Internet Explorer, with "some Java" functions allowed, on a bottom tier (slow) AT&T DSL connection, and have generally had no problem with loading threads as long as I want.

I don't generally do a full thread load for anything with more than about 200 posts shown in the thread list for reading, and will click on the "first 50" number of posts to open longer threads, but if I post anything I usually open the whole thread to verify that the comment was posted and to save "my copy" of the thread.

The longest threads generally remind me of a night at the tavern, where eventually the conversation reaches a stage of "silliness" where nothing very interesting is likely to be said, so I generally go find another group that's still coherent (sober?). I don't recall posting (and wanting to save a record of) anything in a thread with more than about 800 posts, so that's about the largest I've attempted ever to open in full, and in any attempts I've made, a thread of up to 800 posts doesn't take more than about two or three times as long as a thread of 50.

Results would be a little different with a really slow (POTS?) connection, and also if you're in a location that requires your connection to pass through an unusually large number of relay servers. Any single relay point that's "queued full" could drop your download, or delay it long enough for another relay point to "time out" on the download.

Your AntiVirus program and/or any popup blockers or AntiPhishing utilities that you've added on could be blocking something in the content of the page you're trying to load. Done properly, only the "offending item" should be blocked, and the remainder of the download should continue, but mix-and-match conglomerates of programs sometimes just drop the whole download. I use Norton Internet Security in order to get all the functions I want in a single package without my need to worry about a bunch of randomly chosen add-ons being compatible with each other. (There are a number of good "integrated protection suites," so my use of Norton isn't necessarily a product recommendation.)

Even if you have a good protection setup, with previously compatible components, a recent "update" may have changed your system's response to a particular kind of "suspicious content," or may have affected compatibility between plug-ins you've added.

If you have a slow connection, instead of clicking on the thread name to open the entire thread, just click on the numper of posts (if the thread has more than 50 posts so that it shows as a "blue clicky") to get the first 50 posts. Click on the little "d" to get the last 50 posts in reverse order. Once you're in the thread, you'll find links to all the "50 post segments" of a long thread, and you shouldn't have a problem with any of them if you can download threads of up to 50 posts.

John