Quick suggestion as a short term sollution for folks having trouble loading long threads...

2 words... braodband! LOL!!

No, seriously, it'll help a lot if before you visit mudcat, you configure your browser to not load images... that includes backgrounds and such... takes us back to the early text-only days of cyberspace, but it will help pages to load faster, and hopefully load at all where they currently won't...

Best of luck eh!