As if investors needed another reason to reach for the aspirin, many of the most popular stock trading Web sites and online financial information resources have suffered traffic-related meltdowns.

The problems, which cropped up during Monday's market crash, still lingered Tuesday morning.

Servers were down sporadically at the highly-trafficked Stockmaster site, and even mega-sites such as CNNfn and The Wall Street Journal Interactive suffered slowdowns. Some other sites, such as Quote.com, are still experiencing problems today.

While annoying, delays on those sites, which don't offer online trades, didn't really send users through the roof. But glitches at virtual trading shops including ETrade and Charles Schwab & Co.'s eSchwab did.

The Silicon Investor trading chat site was buzzing last night and this morning with griping by would-be online traders who were foiled by glitches on various trading sites.

"Missed the last half hour of trading today thanks to ETrade's f***ed up service. Still can't get on the Web site," one user complained in a message on Silicon Investor at 4:18 p.m. EST yesterday.

"Aww, they've killed me today," moaned another Silicon Investor forum participant. "Nothing but problems getting online with eSchwab via Web. I am going to switch from Schwab because this isn't the first time I've had trouble trading online with them."

Another user logged on to Silicon Investor at 10:52 p.m. EST to say that ETrade's delays had still not been fixed.

"I still can't get into the Web site OR the Tele-Master phone service. I hope their stock drops as a result of disgruntled customers!" he said in his Silicon Investor posting.

While these messages were typical of others found in Usenet newsgroups last night and this morning, an official at ETrade painted an entirely different picture of the site's performance.

ETrade Chief Executive Officer Christos Cotsakos told Reuters today the site performed "flawlessly" in spite of facing twice the normal amount of traffic.

"Today is very much a watershed day in the confidence of the investor," Cotsakos told the news service. "The speed to access content, market information, and execution was markedly faster electronically than through a human."

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