I didn’t know if it was going to happen there for a bit, but I’ve managed to pull together a cleaner, faster loading look for the site without too many personal headaches. You should find everything running quite a bit faster now as I eliminated a large chunk of the graphic files that had to be loaded each time the pages were built.
The downside of all of this is that the new layout is even less IE friendly than the one before it. IE just seems to suck at dealing with standards, and this site is using more and more of the CSS and XML layout goodness so that I can continue to support it over the long haul. That means if you are viewing this site with IE it will probably (no, definitely) not look right. I recommend you go get Firefox and try it. It is far faster and more standards compliant (not to mention newer) than IE.