IE8 Strikes again

Summary: My wife tells me that the internet seems slow on our Desktop at home. She says it seems to get worse using 2 tabs. After using it seems that is the case. It acts as if wireless is at the edge of a connection even though I was connected fine. It was happening in both IE and Firefox.

Troubleshooting: Anyways I check the wireless, fine. I test a constant ping to Google using "ping -t www.google.com" No problem. I reboot all wireless routers involved just for kicks. (We have a Wireless Bridge that connects us to my parent’s network down the road.) No go. I also grabbed my trusty Laptop and suffer no problems. I look to see if any updates may have been causing the problem. Nothing had been installed recently to cause it. Also ran a full scan just for kicks by my antivirus, nothing. At this point I think I might have an idea of the culprit.

Solution: So I uninstalled Internet Explorer 8. Restart and POW, it works awesomely.

Conclusion: So far this is the 2nd time this has happened with IE8. Both times on a Vista Machine. I haven't had an issue with IE8 on all the computers here at work, which is plenty, but 98% of them are XP. I am wondering if how IE8 ties into Vista(maybe win 7 too) is causing this issue. I don't pretend to know the under workings of IE8. The thing I dislike is that it affects Any browser on the machine, not just IE8. So IE8's hooks are deep or something it modifies when installed is in front of all browsing. I must say though I have often just used IE8 but for personal use, Firefox is my highest recommendation at this point and checking the don't install IE8 update. IE7 doesn't seem to have this problem.