Originally Posted by jayeff

I haven't checked your code properly, but a quick look made me wonder whether the load thingy may be because the page is a series of tables contained within a single table. If that is the case, the page likely doesn't load until all the tables are loaded. The way the background loaded before everything else popped up a few seconds later, suggested that too.

If you don't want to (or cannot) do away with tables altogether, you could get around that by making the overall container a div. Things would improve further if you used table-layout:fixed (within a style sheet) for your main tables.

None of these will actually reduce the total load time, but they will make the page begin to display quicker and create the illusion of better speed.