>Why is it that the large banner ads on the front page are instantaneously displayed (ie obviously retrieved from cache) and the other click link icons in the two left frames along with the background take 20 seconds to download instead of coming from the cache?


I have alwaysd attributed this to the fact that the the messages pane (in the lower left) contains a META refresh tag that for some reason prevents IE from caching the graphics. The upper left pane, I have no idea.