Google Adwords/Adsense becoming overloaded?

Many websites I've visited lately have been taking an overly long period of time to load. The page loads up quickly, but the indicator icon shows that the page is still attempting to load. Looking at the status bar at the bottom of the browser, I notice that the component still trying to load is pagead2.googlesyndication.com. As far as I know, this component is used as a referrer for Adsense ads.

Often, the pagead2.googlesyndication.com component of the page never finishes loading, and I can wait for minutes for it to complete. It's as if the connection between the host server and pagead2.googlesyndication.com is locked, and can never complete whatever request is being made between the two. I know that the page never fully loads (even though I can see the content) because the Pagerank value on the toolbar doesn't update from the value shown for the previous page I had visited.

The fix, as a user, is simple enough - I hit F5 and refresh the page (sometimes twice or three times), but is it fair to suck up that website's bandwidth with multiple refreshes because a Google process is either bogged down or broken?

I've only noticed this in the last 2 or 3 months, but over the last several weeks, it has gotten a lot worse. What's puzzling is that some of the pages loading the pagead2.googlesyndication.com component don't have Adsense on them at all, at least that I can see. In my Google Analytic Tools, here's what the big G has to say about it:

"Referrals from pagead2.googlesyndication.com are clicks on your AdWords ads showing on the content network - specifically, ads showing on publisher sites in the AdSense program."

So what gives - if the page has no obvious Adsense, is Google still tracking Adwords data even though I hit the page through a natural link? That doesn't seem right.