Just for future reference, but what is considered a "large" image. From what I can see, most signature pictures around here weigh in between 10 and 20 KB.
I don't mean to be snide or anything, I'm just wondering.
The picture I posted I had edited down to a pretty low resolution from the original and weighed in at 96K, which is only about 5 times what the average sig picture around here is.
Also is this a legitimate concern? Don't most browsers display the text anyway before displaying the images so that it doesn't matter if they are present or not?