>Michel, I have seen this before and on my systems its always because I had another instance of iexplorer running but not visisble on the taskbar. If I checked under Windows task manager there would be a hidden instance of IE. Kill that and then the next IE comes to the front.
In my case, it will only do that if I have another IE instance opened. Which is always the case for most of us I would say. The only way in Win2000 to have it front most and be visible when clicking on an item is to shut all IE instances first. That, of course, won't apply as I really need them to be loaded for various purposes.