I tried accesing the EAD site for ages and e-mailed them with complaints. I even exchanged niceties with "Boris", but with no result.
The site is primarily targeted at large corporate users (airlines), and the GA community is poorly supported.
In the end, I found the solution was to use Netscape Navigator 7.1 - that did the trick.
Also, bypassing proxy settings doesn't seem to work - you have to disable it.
GB