OK, this has been a long battle, and I'm looking for back-up.
Windows network, 2003 servers, Windows 2000 workstations, all with SP4 and IE6-sp1 installed. Every workstation has all updates available from MS.

A few workstations function normally. Most are experiencing the problem stated, that being the First page in Internet Explorer loads slowly. It can be any page, and we've tried many... no change. The first page can take about 20-30 seconds to load. After that, going to links or favorites or any other web site responds normally.

Norton Antivirus 9 installed, scans come up clean.
Ran Ad-Aware and Adware-Alert. Removed a number of minor things, but no change in performance.

Tried reinstalling IE6, Reinstalled Win2K SP4, checked for and installed updates... all with no change in performance.

So... any ideas? I'm all out!

Bill T.

Make sure that the settings on the correctly working PC's are replicated to the ones that are slow.
I have a feeling that it may be trying to Automatically detect settings on the connection and, on not finding any, timing out and connecting as normal.

Hope this helps a little

No. We have a standard image we deploy for all workstations, so we know they have identical configurations. The Autodetect is off, and while I'm here, I'll mention a few other things we looked at.
- All subnets (we have 4) are suffering the same issue.
- I took one station and installed Windows 2000 from the CD, and it worked fine, no delay at all, so we're sure it's a local element of the workstation that's causing this problem, not a switch or server.
- I went through every update one at a time, adding them to the raw image, and none of them resulted in the slow-down, so we've eliminated the MS updates.
- I've removed Norton Anti-Virus from some workstations to see if that might be the cause... again, no change.

If I think of anything else we've tried, I'll add that as well.