Big list of banners loading badly
 

I'm looking for a tech explanation or suggestions for improvement. I'm very confused.

I'm dabbling with a new toplist: http://www.spankingyou.com/autorank.html

It's set to display 50 banners; right now it's got about 35 showing.

I know that's a slow load for many users. I don't really care. Banner sizes are defined, so the whole page loads instantly; I wouldn't mind if it took a week to fill in the banners.

But that's not what happens. Instead, on my cable-modem-connected computer, banners load for 2-6 seconds, and any not loaded at the end of that time display as a red x. I can reload the page and the same thing happens, with different banners. Typically about ten banners fail to load, though it varies.

Back in the day, a browser would cheerfully spend two hours trying to load the graphical elements for a page over dialup. Why in hell is my page not loading completely, whether it takes ten seconds on my cable modem or two minutes for a dialup user?

All suggestions and speculations and advice gratefully considered.

OK, I know it's a lame tech question, but I didn't think it was *THAT* boring!

Are the banners remotely hosted or locally hosted?

Some of each. A few of the red x banners are hosted remotely, more are on my own server. (I've salted the list with banners for some of my own sites.)

maybe because explorer can download 4 images at once, and rest times out?