it's 0207 DST. and the loading behaviour has changed markedly - for the better! are you tweaking? thank you for responding, clint. my apologies for becoming testy in these threads. however, i wasn't aware that you had responded in others. and the frustration of the bizarre loading behaviour was becoming too much. whatever you and the programmers have tweaked in the last 2 hours seems to have helped - from what i can observe.... and if you haven't touched the code or servers, then i'm at a loss to explain why the site's performance has changed.