I've had the signatures and avatars turned off for a long time. No real impact on speed.I was looking how to turn off all the moving icons, photos and banner ads.
I'm a member of a multitude of other boards for
Audio, Video, Photoshop... and other Disney boards (imagine that )
They took the search function away for a while to help with the speed. I'd rather have search and deal with the slowness than to be without it.
So glad it's not just me!
Another way to search the DIS is use google http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.disboards.com
In the search box after it says "site:www.disboards.com" have a space and search for what you want... Should look like this
site:www.disboards.com Christmas pictures
Click here
This is much speedier than dis search.