Haven't noticed, really.
However that t-shirt shop background thing is ticking me off, I've been accidentally clicking on it quite a few times when I meant to click the 'home' button up there. I'm sure it's been purposely put up there just to accumulate accidental clicks!

Convenience mainly. I just open up a new tab for each forum topic that I would like to read so I don't have to constantly hit the back button to get back to open up more. It's not like I open up a crap ton of tabs, mainly just 4-5 max. But I still have problems with this website with just the home page opened.

Happens to me too. Last night I could not use VGC at all for 2 hours.

Strange.  Wonder why some people are having issues, and others (myself included) have no problems at all.

It does take the longest out of all the websites I go too...and sometimes even with posting comments...I get delays...

I timed abunch of websites to give you an idea of how long it takes, I got a connection speed of 5 Mbps, and a fairly good rig for flash.

This is for the main page of these websites and this is until everything is loaded.

VG Chartz: 19 seconds

Gametrailers: 15 seconds

IGN: 14 seconds

MetaCritic: 10 seconds

Youtube: 8 seconds

GameSpot: 8 seconds

Gamefaqs: 6 seconds

Google: 1 second

And here are some other VG Chartz pages

VGC Database: 18 seconds

Game page (Uncharted 2): 14 seconds

Forum (Sony): 11 seconds

Thread: 10 seconds

My Profile: 21 seconds

Community: 19 seconds

Worlwide chart: 20 seconds

Post: 10 seconds

In the past month, VGC has been virtually unusable on my iPhone. Used to load just fine.

Must be something wrong then... taken about 7-8 seconds for me, and a little longer for IGN... and I only get about 3-4Mbps on the cheapest Dell laptop (though I don't think the specs will have anything to do with how fast flash content loads unless the PC is from the 90s)

I'm going by the loading icon for websites and how long it takes to go away, the website is usable earlier then the times I got, but just to get an accurate time I timed the loading icon.

Also this is in Chrome, the fastest browser I have. Firefox and IE takes much longer.

Edit: and there can't be anything wrong with my computer because I just did a clean install to Windows 7 a week ago, so there would be no viruses or spyware or anything on my computer now that would make the pages take this long.

Yes the same method (firefox 3.6 when it stops loading the page) and I wasn't suggesting anything wrong with your computer, but something wrong with perhaps certain groups of people having trouble with this site (perhaps all in a certain region, but i would think someone would have drawn that correlation if it existed already)