Morgan... I wasn't sure where to post this... but there are other alternatives to Lightbox that you may want to consider for increased speed and bandwidth reductions.
Check out...
http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/
http://orangoo.com/labs/GreyBox/
http://script.aculo.us/
The reason I post this is because Lightbox is bandwidth intensive. It takes over 100K of JS code and is limited to images. ThickBox is just about 30K and does images, inline content, external files, and AJAX.
I found these links on the Digg post below.
http://digg.com/programming/A_Cool_C...ashboard_Style
If any of these are useful and may lead to quicker page renders, they may be worth investigating.
~CV