>Same exact thing happened to me after a refomat this weekend. Without looking into it too much, I'm thinking it's directx7. I know it's not the 5.01 update, cause it occured before I got that.

I'm sure it's not 5.01, too, since I had that for weeks before I did the recent downloads like directx7, without any trouble. I'm also sure it's not Win98 V2, sinc I had that a few weeks before the problem.

I even have my IE home page set to Blank, and I still get a long delay often. Maybe I'll see if I can uninstall directx7...