> which closing tag? any /whatever or specifically </HTML>
If you are using nested tables or somesuch and one of the tags isn't
closed, be it a td, tr, or table, page rendering can take a bit on the
browser side of things. It's not as noticeable in IE as it is in the old
Netscape 4.x browsers, so if your delay is 12 seconds and you are using IE
5+, this is probably not the issue.
Jeff