Yes, dial-up folks will need to wait a few minutes for the chat java applet to load. There's no way around waiting when on dial-up ... on a positive note, once loaded, the chat applet may be cached for future use - may load faster the next time it's accessed.

For folks on cable/dsl, the chat java applet should load relatively fast - less than a minute.

It sounds as if many folks experiencing problems either don't have java on their computer (click over to http://www.java.com/ to download; it's a standard component that most every computer should have) and/or their computer is full of task bars, spyware, etc that's slowing down their computer / connection; doing P2P (ie. bittorrent which is two way; uploading stuff even at a slow pace will greatly affect download speed too), audio/video chat, etc in the background will definitely slow down everything else.

Lastly, for a web based chat system to work decent, Java is the only decent way to do it - there's no way to do chat through HTML alone, though many programmers have tried (ie. using auto refresh, etc) with very mediocre results ... Java, a standard programming language/interpreter, bridges the gap and allows one to run highly interactive software, like a chat, in their web browser.

Ron