Originally Posted by Salathe

The problem is that even though the images might be small in size, there are just so many of them. For browsers which don't cache as much, that could mean over 100 trips to and from the TalkFreelance server per page load. Those trips have to be queued down to maybe two at the same time which leads to the delays in loading time as a whole. That's just what you get for a having a graphics-heavy skin.