When people complain about speed, they have to also consider what happens if they have the 'Show Avatars' and 'Show Signatures' features turned on. First it takes additional time to display the image and if people use the IMG tags in a signature, then the TBN forum software has to go to the site where someone's image is stored, probably on another web site, and pull it in. If it's a big image, it can take a while. Even if the vBulletin software caches the images, the image still has to be downloaded from this site, for every avatar and signature in a thread. That's why I don't display either avatars or signatures.