Slow New/Edit Post/Pages Due to Too Many Authors

First, I’d like to mention I’ve spent many days looking for a solution to this problem on google and the wordpress forums and codex, to no avail — which is surprising because I’m confident others have experienced this problem.

Basically, I have a userbase of about 14,000 registered users. When making a new post (in post-new.php), or new page, or editing them — or any page that has an author selection dropdown box — the page will take almost 3-4 minutes to load as it has to call up 14,0000 users. IE will often crash — only can get through on Firefox most of the time, but it is excruciating to bear the load time, and discourages my contributors from posting.

I’m not too keen at PHP, so I’m hoping someone can give me a simple solution….

It would be great if the list will not load any users that are less than a certain rank — or maybe I can have it so I’m required to type in the author manually. I just hope the solution, whatever it may be, will not clash with some of my plugins that generate post authors automatically.

Help! And thanks ahead of time!