My rendering rate has been crap for a while... by rendering I mean that NPC, PC take forever to load when first starting game or when entering new areas... so today I decided to manually enter my DNS setting... I used namebench, which informed me that OpenDNS was my best bet... after switching to that I am no longer getting "unusually long time" loading screens and almost immediate rendering, also no random loading screens when running through towns...
I am not network savvy, so I don't know the ins and outs of the changes I made today and this might just be a coincidence, but it is a noticeable difference...