We are stuck in .Net 1.1 still. I did a little bit of profiling of the application with the Redgate Ants profiler. I concluded that the Master Pages implementation we are using is really slow: Actually, really, really, really slow. We use the LoadControl call to load the masterpage dynamically on every page. In case you are wondering, loadcontrol is very slow and a bad idea in general. I'll post again when I've got the new framework done. In the meantime, I'll be keeping away from LoadControl when I can.