I do not have popups on their site
you are using IE ?

i also noticed with Imageshack that there's a bunch more ads. They have the jobs one that pops up in a new tab/window and then if you accidently click on the image when you "copy location" it pops open another ad. guess they have to make money somehow, but i wonder if that's what's slowing their site down.

I do not see that speedometer link, but note that these sites tests are not always very reliable, as it just shows the speed between you and the site. I havn't found a speed test site fast enough for my current connection, 24 Mbps, though that I already had downloads at more than 2.2 Mo/sec (>17 Mbps) from fast servers (e.g. Microsoft)

try this tool: www.dsl.cz - click on the "speedometer" in the middle of the site - after few seconds it will show you your connection speed - first number is the connection speed (should be in Mbit/s) and the second number (much lower) means the download speed (should be in kByte/s).
Mine are currently - 2,226 Mbit/s and 284,9 kByte/s

oh and close all download in progress during the test

As it says, it is the "local area connection", i.e. the cable between your PC and the modem. After the modem, it is much slower

Possibly, I don't know. There's a lot about computers I don't know. When I hold my mouse cursor over the internet connection icon on my toolbar it justs says "Local Area Connection 2 (I have a router) Speed: 100.0 Mbps".

Really 100 Mbps? Isn't that rather the speed of the network card of your PC?
Usually DSL connections are around 4-8 Mbps, up to 20-30 for some faster services.
Anyway this is the download speed, the upload speed is usually much more limited.
But this is not the reason why small images take time to load.
It is just that Imageshack is from times to times overloaded, there is nothing that we can do about that.
As I said previously, using the imageshack toolbar makes it look like really less slow, as you do not have to go to the home page of the site. I do not know for IE, but in Firefox I just drag & drop the jpeg files to the text area of the comment page of imcdb, it sends the images, and after few seconds it adds the [img] tags there, then I just have to replace linebreaks by spaces.
While it sends the pictures, if it takes more than few seconds, I continue to add the other cars of the movie in another tab/window.

Well, as I said my images take about 10 seconds or so to upload and they are usually less than 100KB. Does anyone else find imageshack slow?

I do have a broadband connection, speed: 100Mbps (whatever that means). Maybe your computer is faster than mine, but normally for me the average internet page only takes up to a second to download. Sometimes imageshack is not too bad, sometimes it's infuriating, sometimes when going between pages that horrible "This is not availage" page comes up. Even when I just click on the frog logo to go to the downloading browser page even takes 10 seconds at times.

For a 321 KB picture it is normal that it takes few seconds to send. And if the original one was much bigger, it is really normal that it takes "long" time.
What is not normal is when a <100KB screen capture takes 20 seconds to send or to download