Sorry Jeff.
They stopped again after my last post, so I spent some more time on it. It is actually happening intermittently on the other machine as well (multiple machines, in both IE and Firefox). It seems that the script attempts to fetch some ads and their server fails to respond. Perhaps you can email them and tell them to get a bigger pipe. Either that or they can stick it in their pipe and smoke it. Nothing more I can do from the user end.