Thanks everyone.
From what has been reported the only variable that seems to have a significant difference in speed is the internet connection. Those on cable or DSL have timings a second or two faster. That makes sense and I guess if the animation were longer there would be more of a change and possibly bringing the other specs into consideration as well.
It is quite interesting to me that the animation run on the machine in an application takes longer than when run over the net. Perhaps that has something to do with what the application is programmed to do best. Later I'm going to see if allocating more memory to various programs runs the animation faster or not.
HighMac, the empty blocks with the X in it happens to me occassionally with IE and in fact did so tonight. I usually go to Prefs, empty the cache, quit the browser and when I start again, all is OK.
And get this, last night while reading one of the threads I noticed the banner loading just as you described it the first time you saw it, the text going so fast you couldn't read it. Reloading that page didn't help but quitting that window and going back to the main forum got the normal speed. Really weird.
