Netscape is picky, it could be one small tag left out somewhere. Am I right in understanding that the slow page shows 5000 records and the fast one shows 700? The difference could be something that is exponential in its impact. Such as too many tables or nested tables. Sounds funny, I'm not totally sure.
There must be more differences in the pages than just the SQL.
NN 4.76 --> 5000 records --> 1 min 20 sec <-- Browser stops responding, eventually displays records
NN 4.76 --> 700 records --> 4 sec
IE 5.0 --> 5000 records --> 10 sec
IE 5.0 --> 700 records --> 4 sec
I wonder if it would work properly in netscape 6 given that it has more IE like behaviours? I really think from the little I know about this situation that I would look to the HTML first and see if you can speed it up that way. I have had the exact same thing happen with SQL functions that populate and display arrays using tables and often the solution was to have the diplaying query spit out rows instead of full tables. It can increase the rendering time exponentially.
It is due to a bug in Netscape 4 which hogs priority in windows and leaves little processing power for your IIS to work through the ASP. You can manually adjust NN4's priority using task manager or, the way I get around it, is to minimise NN4 for a couple of seconds after a submit.
Obviously, if you're browsing a server on another machine then netscape should be fine and this isn't your problem.
Josh
I do the same type fo thing using php and i run 4 nested loops working on about 1000 rows of data doing calculations in each loop for each record and I max out at about 30 sec. With the nested loops it reads each row 4-16 times so I know you can speed it up (I also only use netscape 4.74).
I just don't quite know exactly how off the top of my head without seeing what we are talking about. It may just be that one in 4 people have it return a little slower and you should go with a loading image or message.