Master pages

I delivered a brief talk about ASP.NET 2.0 Master pages, and Membership controls at MS Faculty Meet 2007 at Pearl Continental Hotel Lahore recently. There was a question directed towards me during the Q&A session, which I was advised to take offline. However, I had to split after the Q&A session while the audience had dinner. Perhaps the person who asked the question would read this blog and get the answer.
His question was that pages based on Master pages are very slow to load, which is troublesome over dialup connections. Slower compared to perhaps frames based pages. Then, the other part of the question was that "Microsoft" stores a small 6-9kB configuration file on the client computer which is again a slow operation.
First, my talk was targeted for an academic setting in which speed efficiency of development is more critical than speed efficiency during use. There are comparisons of Master Pages and Frames on the web so I wouldnt replicate them here. You can google them out. Plus, there are ways to improve your webpage load times. An ASP.NET MVP would be better positioned to answer that question for you. Also, the answers are out there on MSDN and the web. About the configuration file, perhaps the reference was to session management, and that is a necessary evil. Once again, I'm sure there are ways to improve the size of that file, as well as the duration between transfers of that file.