Janine, It seems mostly faster here in london (I have a 1mbs adsl line) and much faster on a couple big pages (like
the list of posts for people with lots of posts and the main
bugtracker page). Might have something to do with latency as well.
Jonathan, The version of rlreturnz I have has the IE workaround + some
changes I made (handling i18n charset stuff). You can
download the code we are using at http://xarg.net/download/rlreturnz.tar.gz
I don't remeber exactly where I got the original code from, I think I got the link from a thread here though.
If anyone else has fixes they should post them.