The ethnologue site didn't work too badly for me, but then I'm on a broadband here at work. I might be singing a different tune on my dial-up at home.

But the msnbc code is truely a dog's breakfast. I'd forgotten that I'd stopped going there for exactly the same reason you've noted...that it's dreadfully slow. On the main page, the html code alone is over 60k. My boss would have my butt in a sling if I posted an image-heavy page with that much code behind it. We try to stay under 25k, pictures and all.

I disabled Javascript and surfed into msnbc and indeed it seemed somewhat more responsive, and you can still navigate the site, more or less. I've forgotten how to disable the script engine in IE but in Mozilla it's under the "Edit...Preferences..." tab. Can be done on the fly, too (no need to close and re-open the browser).