We've got a problem that's popping up on our systems here at work, and it's specifically with IE.

When you fire up IE on some systems, about 50% of the time, it sits there saying that it's connecting - sometimes for up to a few minutes. If you close IE, wait a minute, then fire it back up, it usually works and connects to the company intranet or other sites very quickly.

Now, we're all on XP SP3, IE7, and sitting on a bundled T1. Firefox doesn't have the problem, and when I pull up Task Manager and check the networking tab, there is NO traffic while IE is "connecting".

I've gone through an done scans, cleaned the systems, flushed DNS on the systems, and even rebuilt the user profiles - and it still doesn't fix it.

Our users need IE to access several client sites, so we're having a hard time here with this, and I haven't been able to find anthing on the net that addresses this issue. HELP!

Have you cleaned out your Spyware? When my online won't connect or runs slow I do a spyware cleanout and it connects right away and runs like it should.

Also I would check the connection LAN settings and see if the ones with problems are looking for a non-existent proxy or trying to automatically detect settings.

In Connections > LAN settings, it's best to UNcheck all of the boxes.

Also, as well as spyware, ensure the cache and other junk is cleaned out.
CCleaner does an excellent job of this AND it's free.

If everyone is on the same setup, I would have to agree that its something in the individual machines...

Download & run malwarebytes (its free) on a machine and see if it finds anything. Let it clear anything it finds.

Can't hurt :)

No, there's no spyware/malware or phantom proxy settings on the boxes. We keep the machines extremely clean. I'm the IT department here at work, so I can guarantee that all precautions have been taken and scans performed.

Caches are emptied, DNS is flushed, SpyBot's updated, immunized and running, MalwareBytes has been run on all machines along with HijackThis, AVG scans are done, and they're all squeaky clean.

I agree that it's on a per-machine basis so there must be a setting somewhere, but I'm at a complete loss as to why it would happen. It's only happening on about 5 boxes out of 110, so it's very strange.

Do they issues accessing your servers or e-mail systems ?
I'm think TCP settings here, namely MTU set way to low.
LAN should be 1492-1500.

Nope, the only thing affected is IE. Email, Firefox, network access - all of that is fine. I'm pretty sure it's an IE specific issue that I'm missing somehow.

I do have the network settings tweaked with the TCPIPOptimizer from SpeedGuide.net, and that sets MTU to 1500