Image ads are slow

First, thank you for the great module!

Now the request:
I have block with one image ad at the begining of the page. Whenever I refresh the page it stucks for a while (1 sec) on this particular image ad and after this continue loading. When I have the same page without image ad block it loads much faster.

Question:
1. Is it Advertisement module that slow downs the page loading? As I understood there is a javascript inside that loads the image.
2. Is it possible , to speedup page loading, to use just a custom block with html inside showing a picture and linking to:
http://example.com/ad/redirect/19/t1. I guess in this case I'm loosing information from which url advertisement was clicked?
3. Is there any other ways to speed up image ad loading?

Slow loading causing 2 problems on my page:
1. It is slow - :)
2. Lightbox 2 module doesn't start up till page is fully loaded. So, if you already see some pictures on the screen that you can click but page is still loading due to image ad if you click on the image instead of Lightbox 2 you get to see the image file.

Thank you for support!
Alexei

BTW: This behaviour is on my local development machine. I have not yet tested it online.