Im in the process of moving a few sites to another server, and when trying to load the sites the load extremely slowly. I removed the .htaccess files and all went smoothly. Does anyone know what mightb e causing this? I really need to have the .htaccess files active.

What's in the .htaccess files? Anything that may cause hostnamelookups can often be a big factor is slowing things up, especially when the host being looked up doesn't answer..

argg.. I do ban some country tld's and quite a few IP's. I just don't understand why its doing this now? why was it fine on the old server?

Banning IP's or IP blocks should be fine, as those won't cause hostnamelookups. Banning by [partial] domain names (or allowing by domain name for that matter) will always cause hostnamelookups. As far as why it works fine on one server and not another? That could take a little digging to find. Also, hostnamelookups may not be the problem at all, it's just the first thing I would look at for that type of problem. You might try disabling just the parts that might cause hostnamelookups and see if that fixes it.

Cheers! I took out the TLD blocks and its working like a charm!