>>>I have the following issue with IE 8 sometimes. I go to a page and all that shows is the advertising banner at the top. And nothing else. Obviously (I know since I can see it in FireFox) there is content below the ad banner but IE 8 does not show it. What could be done to correct this? Thank you in advance for any suggestions.
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>>Do you have antivirus/antimalware that may be scanning content as it's downloaded, and stopping the page load because it's seeing something it doesn't like? Some security suites are quite aggressive e.g. Trend, as Jos pointed out in a recent thread.
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>I do use Microsoft Security Essentials. I can try to disable it and then open the page that is not showing. I will try this. Thank you.

Sometimes you can see slowdowns that look like load failures. One interesting IE setting is Internet Options...Advanced...Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed. By default this is not checked. If you have this unchecked, over time IE builds up thousands (I've seen over 50K) of temp files in its own temp files folder(s). It can take longer for Windows to search for a "cached" item in your IE temp files, than it would to re-download a new copy from the Internet over a modern broadband connection. I recommend that people manually delete their IE temp files, and enable this setting.

You can also clean up Windows temporary files from time to time.

There is also the Content Advisor in IE, and the Add-on Performance Advisor that could have an effect.