Thanks for the input, Asai Nagamasa-san. You block the image of the button? I suspect it's connecting to the service that is causing my delay, not the loading of the button image, which is rather small. I'll try using an Adblock filter on the actual URL that's showing when it hangs up and see if that solves my problem.

Still interested to know if anyone else is experiencing/has experienced this problem, and if so, how they dealt with it.