We want to use NS Protect and/or NS Secure but we don't want to use the seal. Do we have to display the seal on our website in order for NS Protect or NS Secure to work on our site?

Don't know if this will help you or not...
We do not use NS Protect. I'm not sure if NS Secure is the same as the NS shared SSL logo (it says 128Bit SSLSecurity, I believe other options are also available) we went a long, long time without a logo on our page. Our site did not throw security errors and the URL bar was green without the logo on the page. I kept reading about how important it was to show an SSL so I finally put the dang thing on the left column. We haven't seen any difference in conversions. We never had any questions prior to having it on the page. I'm thinking we should remove it (and all other NS plug-ins like facebook and search) until all the slow loading issues are resolved.

We moved the live seal to a static page to prevent seal load issues a long time ago.
We now have a static seal on the home that send to the live page
conversion didnt change at all, customers know they can dispute all mailorder transactions and seem to care less and less about some "seal" on a site. Frankly many istes I look at and see all the assorted "seals" make me wonder why so many???
Dave

Excellent. It may just be the customers you and I work with, but I'm stealing your suggestion! As always, thank you.

All yours
Dave

Thanks from me as well. Might as well remove all possible causes of latency.

Also make sure any home page images, headers etc are as small as possible to save page load times.
We have ours as small as we can make them in most cases.