Safari intermitantly not loading pages/images

[scaryfish]

I have this weird issue with Safari (1.3 on OS X 10.3.9). It has been around for a while (since the previous version at least). Basically, sometimes when I click a link or type an URL in, it gives the "Can't connect to the server" error straight away (no delay whatsoever). If I click again it usually loads fine.

Also, quite often on pages with a lot of images, most of the images will fail to load and just display the blue questionmark boxes. In the activity window it shows "Can't connect to host" for the affected images. If I reload the page, they will often load fine. Here's an example.

This is really bugging me. It's not like the pages or images are timing out, because it displays the error or bluebox immediately. Is anyone else having this problem?