Kerry:
The animated avatars are gif files that are strung together as an animated gif in a program like photoshop or fireworks. Just like a moving picture, animations are basically a string of still shots that are strung together with a time constant to show each still picture in succession, and set to either reverse or repeat at the end so it doesn't stop. It is limited mostly by the file size limitation of the avatar feature. my old avatar
is 6 different still gif pictures set to each display in sequence for a 1/4 second, pause, reverse, and repeat. A 3D is the same thing. Always limited by the Avatar size settings, though, so I can't have a full page avatar of 300SL Gullwing driving up, raising the door, and showing Leise smiling and waving! It would be fun to play with the front of a 500E and have it appear as a dot in the page, and accelerate towards the viewer, then fais out to background and repeat! Maybe I'll give that a try!
Gilly:
It sounds more like a problem with your ISP, although turning off the cookies will usually make loading slower, and sometimes allow connections to 'time out', especially if it is a dial up connection instead of cable or DSL.