Hi Hanter. I assume you're talking about having a menu frame vs. a menu applet or a JavaScript menu?

I can't imagine that load time is a factor between HTML frames and JavaScript. We're talking about miliseconds, if anything, depending on the user's computer. I mean, if they're running an ancient browser on an ancient machine, javascript can pose problems, but I haven't heard of it being a significant factor in a while. Depending on the applet or the Flash code, that could be a bigger factor, but, again, I'm not sure load time should be a major consideration.

There are some sizable concerns with frames. The most significant one is with bookmarking. Most users won't even know how to bookmark a particular page on the site (they'll generally just end up bookmarking the frameset itself, which isn't so helpful). There are issues with search engines, as well -- they may not crawl properly, or they may link searchers to frameless pages inside your site that have no menu at all (bypassing the frameset).

Then again, there's nothing mutually exclusive about using JS/Flash vs. frames. Assuming you're talking about having a JS/Flash in a menu that carries over across pages, you could also just have a menu frame that uses JS/Flash.

I would personally avoid frames except in very specific circumstances where they may make sense in terms of design (like if you want to display multiple sites at once, or something clever like that). They're not so good for navigation.