TarantinoFan: Within that little red number is a lot of code. Particularily the website link to whatever game you have with each friend. There is also some html code to change the color of the font to red... so those things together may be causing a few extra moments of delay...

The thing to do to get rid of that little delay is to make all your friends not friends. You could also stay on top of all of your games, meaning less code pops up that you have to wait to load, and the final option is to nicely ask Fencer for a way to eliminate those individual things on the right side.... which would be a really nice feature... or a way to reorganize the side features to the way each individual person wants it organized... that would also be nice! I don't think it is a neccessity, but those are things that can always be done to give the individual more control of there main page... sort of like facebook! ...you can make it look like however you want! ...within reason of course.