For what it's worth, the "Ventrilo Status" menu tool was the culprit. One of our web dev type members figured this out and asked us to shut it off and sure enough... the site returned to it's old snappy self.
Ahh. You must have been using code snippet provided from your vent host. That's a common problem. Javascript will wait for it to process before doing the rest of the site, and if the site it's waiting on isn't responding, then it just hangs there.