IE 8 and 9 freezes
I had the same problem that seemed to begin after a Windows update during the night of September 25. I had only two windows that would open up for me and not freeze; Bing and Google. All others would attempt to load, but were always sub-captioned with the notation "waiting for response from server". Usually, the page would finally finish loading after 5 minutes or so, but then the same thing would happen on subsequent clicks on links within that page.
I tried a great number of things to solve this issue but finally landed on the right trick. In IE, I navigated through Tools/Internet Options/Programs/ to Manage Add-ons. Here you can disable all the visible Add-ons, but the key was to select the button "Currently Loaded Add-ons" and choose "Show All". I was surprised to see the number of add-ons more than double, with a whopping 16 listed under Microsoft alone. I disabled ALL of the add-ons and from there on IE functioned perfectly, and at speeds I was unused to. I suppose the next step would be to enable the add-ons one by one, testing IE to see which one was the culprit causing the freezes, but I'm enjoying the enhanced internet browsing speed so much I think I'll just leave them disabled for now. I notice that when I visit certain web sites, I will be asked to enable a certain add-on, so may do that on an as-needed basis. Note that by earlier upgrading to IE 9, nothing was solved. Best of luck!