One of the reasons that I use Linux is because I am addicted to updates (another is that I am a masochist, as previous events will show). Waiting several years for new features (much less bugfixes!) is ridiculous. Sometimes, one pays a price for being on the cutting edge.
About a week and a half, I noticed that I was unable to access the Crimson's website. The first time this occurred, I assumed that the Crimson was going through one of its periodic outages, and did not pay much attention to it. I also dismissed it the second time, although I did note that the Crimson RSS feed script did not seem to have any problem scraping the site.
After the third time (sometime last week) that my attempts to access the Crimson website reached a timeout before retrieving the entire page, I was annoyed. Even more disconcerting , the problem did not seem to be limited to Firefox, as wget and lynx displayed similar symptoms. Yesterday, I noticed that wget on the FAS server and Firefox on my little sister's computer has no problems retrieving the site, confirming that the problem was machine-specific.
Luckily, I ran into this thread on the Gentoo forums a few minutes ago. It suggests that the problem is from the use of TCP window scaling in the 2.6.8 kernel, which causes "broken" (read: cheap) routers to not work properly with certain websites. Quick fix:echo "0" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling