jasonkester: in jQuery 1.4.3 a lot of work was done to make jQuery more modular. So you could take the peices of the library that you want and leave out the rest (i.e. effects).
This isn't the recommendation of the jQuery Team but if you feel the library is getting too bloated you now have the option to cherry pick only the options of jQuery you'd like to use.
Exactly, which makes the size of the file much less critical. It's likely to already be cached on the drive by some previous page, even from another domain. Slicing jQuery core into subset files that are dynamically loaded and other such techniques are unlikely to make things better.