I'm so not very technical but it might help to point out when you open up a thread on ATP, if it is a new thread to you, only the first page will open. If you've been on the thread before, then it will skip to where you left off, so only one page at a time is loaded. It will be the first page or it will be the page where you left off, but the middle pages will not load.
If you've set your site preferences to view 100 posts per page and if that page has 10 images per post, then you see what you might run into, you'd be loading 1000 images. So on threads that I know will contain lots of images, I just go into my preferences and set my post number to 20 or even less. Normally I have it set to 200 posts if I know there will be few pictures.
That might make a difference if you are having 'slow' issues.
Hope this didn't muddy the waters, I'm not technical enough to know any other way to explain it.
