Rose: If your main problems are on discussion board pages, or pages where it is time to submit your move, (Basically any page where the text box shows up), I highly reccomend going to "Change Smileys" and emptying them out. I found that the more recent smiley additions must have "huge" smileys. (I'm talking about when the batch including the smiley was added). After I emptied it out completely, all pages where the text box shows up loaded at their normal speed of 3 to 4 seconds! I then gradually started adding smilies, and sort of found out which ones were slowing things down.

Shutting off smilies in Settings was NOT enough.

I was so frustrated for weeks. MOST brainking pages were loading in 2-4 seconds, EXCEPT any page that included the text box. Those were taking 15-20 seconds! (And I have DSL)

It's worth a try anyways! It worked for me! (I now only have about 10 smilies in my "change smiley" area.)