probably easy to solve if you bring up a terminal and run top to see how much of
your resources are being used by each program.  It's possible that netscape is
the culprit.

> I am downloading some Oracle sw off of their website to tool around with. I
> am downloading it through Netscape. The download file is pretty big (couple
> hundred MB), and ever since I started the download KDE's refresh rate has
> been extremely slow. Now, I already have complaints with KDE to begin with
> for it being slow, but it's even slower than the slow I've come to expect
> from it.
> 
> Is it SuSE, is it KDE, or is it me? :)