Not sure what happened if it resolved itself. Sometimes IE is just flaky with that stuff too. We've had problems elsewhere with IE (as you might have guessed).
As for the page being so large, yes, it is. No disagreement here...that sucks. That said, is the site running slow for you? What kind of load times are you getting? Also, there are many factors why the page is so big and we'll be fixing a bunch of them over time (not super high priority though unless the site is really slow for a majority of our users).
- ASP.NET IDs get huge the further down controls get embedded. We're going to do some changes in our base controls that should shrink those considerably.
- Telerik's editor seems to add a lot to the page. Anywhere you can reply in the site we render the text editor (even if you never hit reply or new thread). In the future, we'll probably rig it to lazy load instead so the total size of the page goes down for those just reading.
- Lots of AJAX code at the bottom of the page. We have a big custom control library. This allows us to never ever use UpdatePanels and have every single request be big and pass view state around even if we don't need it. The side effect is a bunch of initialization code (that can't really be crunched [whitespace can be crunched, but not variable names]). Not sure there's much we can do about this except continue to evolve our controls and how they talk to each other and possibly move it out to a dynamic js file that gets cached.
We're quite agile now that the base platform is there so we will continue to evolve it (unlike the old C9).