I read over at Lifehacker that disabling Google Talk within Gmail significantly speeds it up. Since I do all my chatting with gaim (now Pidgin) anyway, I went ahead and did that. I did like the sound it the Gmail-embedded Talk made when I got a message, though. A quick search found them: Google Talk Sounds. Now, I’ve got gaim set up to play the same sound whenever I get a new conversation-starting message. It’s gtalk1.wav inside the zip file.