I agree, the only thing that third party stats do are to suck traffic away, and slow down page load. I'd suggest at least getting a paid hosting account so that you can run your own remote stats package so that you don't have any of the trouble with 3rd party one's. It shouldn't cost you more than 10 to 20 a month, which you can use for all of your free hosting stuff. Maybe it's time that you all started to ask your free hosts for stats, it would be a win-win situation. Both of you would win because there is less stuff on the page trying to get the surfers attention !!!
Tim