IE8 and especially xp has some problems, ie6 has some leaks( and no tabbed browsing). My favorite back/forward shortcut for ie, firefox and opera is Shift + mouse scroll that can take you several pages forward or backwards at once; that doesn't work with googleChrome (nor on a lot of 'Adobe. type pages like .pdf and .swf). Really frustrated that it works with internetExplorer but not windowsExplorer - even though they are built on same engine.
Some fair troubleshooting can be done old school; from the daze of win3.11. Open start-> programs -> accessories-> winCalculator -> help -> help topics -> click on the question mark in upper left -> choose jump to url -> enter address of site including
http://...
This is more of a bare bones IE; if things work right here and not in normal IE, look more to add-on to regular IE blocking you etc.
One good thing about IE7 & 8 is they have a reset under tools->options, might try clearing all data, cookies, pages etc. too(but will lose favorite lynx, passwords etc.). Might even try winkey + R to get run box, and type in inetcpl.cpl to make sure aren't getting some redirected form of IE that is giving problems. But, Firefox is generally the way to go, except if a site doesn't take anything but IE correctly, or at all; that is only reason i keep IE around (and for testing Flash etc. in different browsers). Most have followed googleChrome's lead in making each tab a separate process, so if one tab crashes, the rest don't suffer a cascading dominoes effect and follow suit.
