I have been speed optimizing a Wordpress site to little effect. There are three files CSS-related php files from the Wordpress theme that are delaying page loads on the site. One of the three files is basically one line of custom CSS from the custom CSS feature in the theme.

You can see what I am talking about with this Pingdom speed test:

The yellow is 'Wait'. There are no slow items in the cut-off portion of the image.

The full results are here: Pingdom Results Page

1. Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

I understand that I have blocking CSS or JS files, but I don't see anything that would be causing that long of a wait. When I ran the P3 Plugin Profiler, Wordpress and all plugins appeared fine -- it is the theme that is taking all the time.

GTmetrix recommends avoiding dynamic queries. I assume all the ver=3.61 references are to the version of Wordpress (which I am using). I noticed that my Wordpress sites using other themes don't make this query (at least not over and over).

2. Is this typical coding practice?
3. How much negative impact do these query-strings have -- a little or a lot?

I tried searching for similar questions here, please excuse me if I missed something. Sometimes, I know just enough to be dangerous.