We were deploying a new Moss portal for one of our customers and everything was working quite well. The only problem we found was after doing a search, any link we clicked on from the results page would take over a minute to return. We were perplexed that the portal could be performing as well as it was, but this one page would grind to a screeching halt. After numerous Google searches, we finally surrendered and called MS professional services. While on the phone with PS, we performed numerous netmon and fiddler captures trying to diagnose what was causing this behavior to no avail. One of our team members continued to search Google and found a link by Peter Stilgoe that matched the issue that we were seeing. It turns out that federated search was set to return results from an external provider vice the local index. Our Web Front ends are on a network that does not allow internet access and this caused the results page to wait until the timeout was reached (default is 60 seconds) before allowing us to continue. We took a different approach than outlined in Peter’s article. We edited the results page and removed the federated search webparts from the page. Now we are up and running with the same performance across all SharePoint pages. Thanks Bill for finding Peter’s page.