Really annoying IE problem

[Insomniac]

Just recently I've started to have a problem fairly regularly when browsing the web. After browsing for a while I'll try to open a page and IE will get stuck saying 'waiting for reply' or somthing similar in the bottem left. The page never loads, and closing and re-opening doesn't solve it. I looked in task manager after doing this, and I had multiple 'iexplore.exe' entries running. I opened the location of them and they seemed to be in the right place (I'll double check next time it happens), so I don't suspect malware (MBAM, AVG and Spybot all come back clean, and I can't see how I've picked up any malware in the last few days)

I haven't yet tried system restore because windows has installed updates just today, so I'm not sure how that will affect them. If it's okay to system restore after windows updates I'd like to know about it.

If I try and kill the processes in task manager, nothing happens. If I try and log of it just sits there trying. I can ctrl-alt-del and select 'switch users' to get back to the login screen. If I log into another user they will log in and out just fine, but won't be able to load pages with IE. If I try and shut down from the log in screen, it hangs with just the mouse pointer and the login screen background. The mouse responds but it won't shut down and I'm forced to hit the reset key.

If I tell my user to log off then use ctrl-alt-del to get to the login screen, somtimes I'll hear the logoff sound and think my account has managed to log off. However, if I try to log back in I just get a dull blue screen with the 'welcome' on it, and the little spinning O next to it. Again, forced to hit the reset key.

Any ideas on how I can sort this out? I'm running vista, zonealarm and AVG, and using IE7.

EDIT: Just a couple of things I forgot. Most of the time the pc runs fine, and I can view pages and log on and off perfectly. I think this problem happened twice today.

Also, I think that when trying to load google when this problem was happening I noticed down the bottom left it had 'connecting to (what looked like an IP address here) Not sure if this means anything but I thought I'd mention it.

[YoKenny1]

Have you tried to clean IE's Temporary Internet Files Folder commonly called TIF?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260897

By the way the default size of the Temporary Internet Files Folder is 12% of the hard drive that IE is installed on which is way too much these days.

In IE go to Tools then Internet Options then Browsing history then Settings then make Disk space to use 100MB which should be good for a days browsing.

Cleaning out the TIF with CCleaner once a day is also good.

[Insomniac]

Can't be caused by that... I clear all my temp stuff by using IE's delete browsing history, then use Ccleaner (ccleaner always misses a few cookies but by using delete browsing history in conjunction with it they are deleted) and then use Milshield (another cleaner, but it's a bit slow so I clear stuff with ccleaner first and just use Milshield to pick up anything left over)

I do this just before I log out every single time, to make sure I'm logged out of forums etc.

Ok, got a bit of an update here. Last night dad tried a system restore, to see if this would fix it. However, it happened again today. This time though, there were no extra 'iexplore.exe' processes running. So I used task manager to kill almost every running process, exept the ones that weren't running under my name... Tried logging off, and it worked perfectly. (however prior to logging off IE still woudn't display pages)

So later I logged into admin, and it told me that system restore had met an unspecified error and hadn't completed successfully (which is strange, because MIL shield was at version 6.6 when before the restore it was at 6.7. Odd)

So assuming the system restore was corrupt, I made a new one right then and tried restoring to it. Same error. Tried in safe mode and it worked, although I haven't tried restoring back a few days in safe mode yet.

Right now I'm just going to use a slow and tedious process of elimination to find what process/processes need to be killed to let me log of straight away. If this is from some 3rd party software I should be able to track down the problem.

Arn't computers fun!

[Insomniac]

Tried restoring to a week before today... baaaaad idea. When it booted up it said it had recovered from an unexpected shutdown, and mentioned a bluescreen. However it then said the system restore completed successfully (I did the restore from safe mode). I didn't see if it actually crashed or not, as it was taking so long I went and did other stuff. All seemed well at first but then AVG reported that the email scanner wasn't active becuase of a missing plugin or somthing like that. Rather than try and fix that (I did a quick google that didn't show anything) I just undid the restore (this restore didn't actually make an 'undo' for some reason, so I did the restore point created to undo the previous, test restore. AVG is fine now, but I'm still getting the occasional problem with IE. However, now it DOESN'T completely disable the system. I had it happen when using the steam overlay's web browser (it uses IE to do that stuff, so it's all interconnected) I noticed that pages weren't loading. Quit the game, which caused a non-responding process from the game (Team fortress 2 btw, been playing for ages without issues). Task manager actually closed it though, and logging of and straight back on fixed it.

So now by simply messing with system restore I've made it much easier to exit from this state.

BTW, scanning with spybot's immunize finds a lot of unprotected stuff, I assume this is due to system restore. Is it likely that the immunization is what's causing things to be un-killable by task manager? I'll immunize and see what happens next time this issue surfaces. Is immunizing really neccessary?