[dsawyer]

The sample didn't tell me a whole lot unfortunately. Do either of you have a proxy setup that you connect to the internet through?

No, no proxy. And I can duplicate the problem on my home system, a PowerMac G5 with Mac OS X 10.5.5 and OW 5.8, which connects to the Internet through a completely different ISP (Comcast).

And just for the record, if you set your preferences aside do you continue to see the slowdowns?

Yes. As I said in my first post, I've trashed everthing - prefs, caches, support files, etc. It will even happen with a completely new Mac OS X user with a completely fresh launch of OW. So it seems probable that it's a not a problem this installation but rather with OW and the sites, perhaps some changes to JavaScript or CSS loading or perhaps a change in the DNS that OW now has trouble parsing.

Dave