Chris,
An update for you.
I deleted v2.40.7 from my main Dev site (the one that was previously running v2.40.7) and reuploaded v2.40.3.
I changed nothing at all (i.e. all settings remained the same) and tested the same page again.
Here are the results with v2.40.3:
Page load time: 1.80s
Total page size: 247KB
Total number of requests: 26
And exactly the same page with v2.40.7:
Page load time: 2.81s
Total page size: 574KB
Total number of requests: 58
Quite a difference!
Clive