One thing that's helped me is to use a combination of cache management in IIS and also enabling HTTP Compression.  I have a page that loads 2 cute edit controls and without HTTP Compression/Caching the page would take > 15 seconds to load over the Internet.  By enabling compression and caching in IIS 6, page load time drops to ~5 seconds.

 

I hope that's helpful...

 

Jeramie