Had a white screen database error logging in just now. Tried it again and it worked ok. Network gremlins I suppose, or squirrels humping on a phoneline somewhere.
Recently discovered that disabling script permissions (via Firefox) for all URLs but USMB's reduced a full thread (10 replies) from about 30s load-time to about 10s.
Downside of course is the script permissions thing applies to all URLs (so disabling google's here on-site disabled gmail and search engine scripts later when you're using them.) So make sure when you leave here you re-enable those if you need to make use of them.