I decided to run my usual Uploader test. I used IE7 on Windows XP Service Pack 3, which uses the ActiveX version of the Aurigma uploader. This is an older 1MB - 1.8GHz System I'm phasing out, so nothing special in the performance department. I ran the test at 10:56 EST using my standard set of 32 images. The images are all just under 1MB in file size.
The uploader gave an estimate of 7 minutes 52 seconds to complete and did complete, including the switch to the confirmation page, in exactly 8 minutes at 11:04. The resize of the images during the upload process dropped the sizes to 111.12KB.
This is actually a very good result for this old system and my prior history with running this test.
The only slow/odd behavior was a visible slowness in the Folder where I have the images stored showing the images prior to doing the select and ADD (which did work normally).
Danno
Edit: I went back to do some more observations on that slowness of the thumbs appearing in the Uploader's selection window. Looks like the process to display the thumbs really hits the processor hard, like 99%, until all the thumbs in the folder are loaded. I do have a suggestion, given that behavior. If you have a very large folder for your pics, move just the ones for upload into a separate folder, perhaps in small batches. That might stop the processor spikes that would obviously cause a slowdown in both the selection and transfer processes. See if that helps...
Edit2: I just checked the JAVA version on Firefox 3.0.6 (same system) and got the same slow thumb image load. It took about 20 seconds of 90%+ spike of JAVA to get the 49 images in the selection Folder to load. That spike and slowness might account for some of the reported problems with both browsers. A very large folder of images could certainly cause probems with this observed spike during processing.