Don't know what has happened but I am only able to read about four messages before the next nineteen take forever to load (sometimes they never do and I wind up manually shutting it down). I have run virus scans (AVG), Ad Aware, Malwarebytes Antimalware and nothing harmful turns up. I have done disc clean up, and defrag but nothing helps. I have a long list of cookies and recognize some of them from sites I visit but don't recognize most of them. I tried removing some but then get pop up windows asking me to accept things I never heard of.
This is driving me absolutely bannanas. Any help would be truly appreciated. It was bliss when I could read all the helpful information here and surf to all the different sites.

So many different things could be the problem- what browser are you using Internet Explorer or Firefox ? How old is the computer ? What Internet service are you using ? Dial up is the slowest

Have you defraged your computer lately?

I hate to say it, but I've gotten more than a couple of viruses through this site. 'Didn't stop me though!

Admin does everything and anything possible to keep this site safe - if however you click a link and leave the site there are no guarantees what will happen.

What do you mean? Are you talking about the message digests or topic listings in recent topics or on some other page?

My computer is only about a year old. I am using Mozilla Firefox and yes, I have defragged also. I receive my daily Quiltboard messages through gmail (also experience the same problem when reading messages from my yahoo groups). I'm about convinced I have picked up a virus but would it allow me to read only a few messages and then lose the connection?

That's strange. Try searching google for AVG. It's free antivirus program with great reputation.

If you have Safari, then go to the top and tell Safari
to "Reset Safari" which will clean out a lot of stuff that is
making it slow. I just had to do that an hour or so ago. I'd
downloaded some sweepstakes information that immediately
slowed down my computer. Took ages to start new files.

I have been using AVG for quite awhile now and they have found no problem on their scans.
I'm not familiar with Safari -- I'll have to check it out.