try clearing your temporay internet files.

how do i do that?

Inside Internet Explorer, click on the Tools menu. Then click Internet Options. Under the General tab, where it shows Temporary Internet Files, click the button to delete the files.

Incidently, there was another thread a few days back talking about how hotmail recently redid their site, and since they did, a lot of users have been having problems. That might be it too. But clearing out your temp files never hurts!

they redid alot of their site to be less bandwith heavy and use the new .net applications. originally hotmail got bought out by msn and slowly they worked off freebsd servers. now they all run 2k3 and .net and they also got rid of tons of old heavy images and moved to a more standardized ammount of code / images

you guys are awesome! thanks for your input.

i tried what dani said, but under tools (on internet explorer) i show "track auction, auction manager, download manager, autofill forms, show related links..." I'm on a mack with os 9.2. does this matter?