1. Yes, perfectly properly
2. I'm not Frank but oh well
I think toolbars are risky, especially on dial up. I don't suggest MSN or
Yahoo are trying to do anything evil (unlike some of these spam/ad cowboys)
but these things do increase the flow of data back and forth and this is not
exactly "Spare" capacity on dial up, especially as ordinary web pages become
more active content intensive.
In my experience they also increase the risk of glitches such as the long
delays you mention. Can't prove this but I've run a clean IE for years and
have not had 1% of the trouble with it that people here regularly ask
questions about.
AntiVirus programs are by their nature invasive, and can take up a lot of
time. If you have one that's got "Everything" turned on and it's scanning
(for example) your temporary internet files this can conflict with IE and
other things - locking them out while the AV does it's job. I guess what I
am saying is that your problem with delays might be due to a setting that
you could change without increasing any risks.
Sometimes removing spyware breaks things, it's unavoidable because some of
the junk is designed that way either by intention or carelessness. Usually
though it breaks IE or your network connection all the time, not just
occasionally.
I would suggest you check you AV settings and turn off email scanning (which
contributes very little) and maybe stop MS antispyware running in the
background for a while as you try a few known good sites. You need to be a
bit more careful if you turn off the AV completely for testing purposes but
you can do this provided you are careful with email and preferably set the
option to read all in plain text in Outlook Express. Personally I'd also go
to start>control panel>add remove programs and remove the toolbars using the
proper method and remove anything else you see there that isn't an official
update or some software you definitely know you are using. Just ask if you
don't know what something is and someone here might recognize it.
You might also go to internet options and on the general tab delete files
and remove the temporary internet files. You can get rid of any stuff you
have stored locally too but this is unlikely to be your problem. For setting
there I tend to stick with automatic.
See what Frank has to say, I suspect you have had an encounter with spyware
but since the problem is not continuous a good clean up might be the simple
answer.
Charlie
