A good rule is that most pages in a site should be under 30K, a few can be 30 - 50K, and perhaps one or two can weigh in all 70K. Pages larger than that should either belong to 800 pound gorillas or be put on a diet. If you want to force your visitors to go out to lunch while your page loads, fill it full of 8 bit dithered GIFS in the foreground, and don't forget an enormous high quality JPEG in the background. Although they make images smaller, they also make images look like they've been nibbled by leaf-cutting ants. Strive to eliminate jaggy lines or pixilated areas of images that should be smooth. Dithering is a form of jaggies, since the pixels are usually noticeable.
Halos are the biggest symptom of pixel rot.
You can always do something to make it better. If you have a site, you know there are places you haven't touched in a long time and two months is a very long time on the Web. We all start with horizontal rules and blank line typography. It's part of the learning curve. As we gain control of our pages, we raise the bar on ourselves, striving for better pages as we add tools to our toolkit.