I've not poured over HTML presented by PM, but sounds like an HTML tables "feature" = nothing within a table will render until all content in the table has been retrieved.

If this is the case, a number of HTML solutions are possible.

Update: Adam says it more clearly below.  ie: Browser will display nothing within HTML table until browser receives closing tag </table>.   So your browser probably didn't hang, it was just waiting to retrieve all of table before displaying any markup within table.
    cheers,
    ybiC