> The 'parsing' and validation of links seems to take too
> long, and hence bandwidth is wasted because of a blocking

- User recent releases (such as 3.30-RCxx)

- Use 'Set Options' / 'Mime Types'
to set default mime types to dynamic files ; this should 
speed up greatly the processing

> Why have parse phases and download phases together?
This is the case ; but type testing are still slow anyway

> Why validate links while parsing on new downloads
> anyhow?
This is only done on "unknown" files such as asp, php.. to 
name the local file. Again, MIME types should fix this 
issue.

> I seem to recall that some servers support serverside
> compression of html on the fly, which again, speeds up
> performance significantly.

Supported by httrack now (gzip and deflate compression), 
among with other cool things (Keep-alive, Chunking, Etag, 
SSL..)