A whimsical notion..
 

Had some trouble recently with IE 7 acting slow etc, old Acer 9300 laptop doing well otherwise despite its years. Usual fixes, spyware search, reg defrag clean, registry manual check for things, running processes, , no Norton etc., all the usual supects. Not much change to slooow performance. Then started using (already installed) Firefox out of sheer petulance, when using IE again, things have improved....:suspect:

"Puzzled of the New Republic of Jockistan"

I think Firefox is more resource hungy than IE, I also use the former out of sheer petulance, but keep getting pop-up warnings from AVG that it is using a lot of memory.

Thank Cape , used to be an AVG person, now running Avast, no warnings. Obviously it's registry issue, probably solved with the reformat, but I was intrigued when a change of browser seemed to put some order back into the IE camp. I had also sorted a lot of plugins and things as well - the only change was using Firefox for an hour, and then Explorer started to behave itself - bit like 'HAL' :E