E-Journal platform connectivity issues

The Nature website and the Synergy/Blackwell website have been experiencing some connectivity issues over the last couple of days.
Several of these issues are :
1....users unable to connect at all or connecting with very slow response times. Slow response times will vary from 1 minute for a small PDF file (100KB) to 5 minutes for large PDF file (1000KB).
2....Nature journals requesting username and password in one browser and not in another browser.
3....Nature journals connecting on one computer when a nearby computer is not connecting at all.

There are several things that users can do to optimize their connectivity.

1...Time of day --
the Nature e-journal platform and the Synergy/Blackwell e-journal platform are both in London, England, a 5 hour time difference from EST.....try to avoid the 11am-2pm EST time frame. Rapid response time does come back later in the afternoon EST.

2....Browsers ------
a.....Make sure your browsers are set to accept all cookies, as Nature uses cookies extensively.
b....Make sure your browsers do not block pop-up-windows, as Nature uses pop-up windows .
c....Using one browser over another does not seem to make much difference, although, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and Safari have less issues on the whole, than does IE.

3....Upgrade------Be sure to keep on top of upgrading your versions of the browsers and pdf file readers. Publishers continually upgrade their services, so should users.

4...Netscape users should now have Netscape 7.2

5....Firefox users should be on Firefox 1.0

6....Opera users should be on Opera 7.54u2

7.....MAC users using Safari should be on Safari 1.2

8.. . IE (Internet Explorer) users should be on IE 6

9....Adobe has recently upgraded their reader to Adobe Reader 7.0