I'll dig around the UBB Site to see if others have reported similar issues.

A way around bandwidth is to break it up into smaller "pages", assuming you're brought to the right page in the first place. While it appears the default posts per page is 10, some users may have been incremented to a much higher number. Under "My Stuff" -> "My Preferences", you can alter the number of posts per page.

The author of UBBThreads is trying to track it down to include the fix in the next point release (7.2.1) which should enter beta testing shortly. Some folks have posted snippets of code to attempt to fix the issue, however it seems to only last the session, which isn't good enough for me to include here.

You'll find most forums now-a-days use a flat style, which I also use. It's not better, but what I'm used to, so I guess I find it hard to relate otherwise. For me, it offers less clicking, but more scrolling.