I strongly suggest that you personally either have a temporary dial up connection installed or go to a friend's computer that only has dial up and try to get your site to load up in less than 3-1/2 minutes.
I suspect that not all members have cable/dsl/satellite modem service available to them either because of regional issues or financial ones, and I tried my old dial up as a test.
In order to get to the threads to post or read anything, I first had to wait for well over a minute and a half to get them to show up because the ads and displays all around the threads began to load up first. In order to not wait the entire almost four minutes for the rest of the stuff to load, I had to use the STOP button in the IE toolbar once I saw the threads load up.
I have a 56K modem installed, but most times can't get connection of anything higher than 38.6 and usually lower than that which actually is pretty good for these antique mountain phone lines. Even if I could get closer to 50K, I really don't think it would make a whole lot of difference in the amount of time it takes for these pages to load....especially since once you click a post to read it, the page again goes through the whole process all over again. Having the pages be cached helps slightly, but if you want new content each time, as Moderators need, you have to set your options to view new content each click.
This is not a good thing, Lee....people will be turned off pretty quickly with the amount of time it takes to load a single page since the ads have priority in the loading sequence.
TONI