I have been working with my hosting provider to improve the speed issues with this forum. Unfortunately the results have been marginal at best. The problem is simply a matter of bandwidth from the shared server my site is hosted on. The solution is also simple. Buy dedicated server space. The bad news is that is very expensive.
Because I only pay for shared server space that means other sites are hosted there also. If the combined traffic from all these site gets to high then speed suffers. My site is one of the heavy traffic sites on that server so it looks like we get throttled first. That's fair because it is shared space and the other sites should not have to suffer. It's a money thing.
I will make some decisions on how to handle the problem pretty soon. The only things hosted on that server are this forum, the photo gallery and the scroll saw patterns for download. The main blog is hosted with Google and is not affected.
Sorry about the problems.
