I've got the basic page up now.

sinfonicron.dignan17.com

I scaled back a bit, used regular text for the links, and I guess I'll give up for now on the "knowing what page is loaded" thing. Right now my concern is that the image swap is so darn slow! I followed the advice on irt.org, which was to put a tag of each image to preload somewhere and give it 1x1 dimensions. But it's still slow. What can I do to speed it up?

*edit*
not all those links have image swaps yet. just a few of them.