Vista Tutorial - IE Problems on a laptop

First of all, hello to everyone here. This is my first post on these forums, but I have been avidly reading the fabulous tips and info provided here. I am planning on getting a new PC in January with Vista on it, but for now, the problem I am having is on a friends' laptop, and he is requesting my assistance in fixing it.

When trying to load Internet Explorer (IE7), the 'spinning blue circle' pointer shows for a few seconds, then stops, and no IE window opens. It would appear that IE failed to load, but gave no error message.

On checking the task manager, however, I found that there were 40-50 iexplore.exe processes running. I promptly ended every iexplore.exe task, and tried again, only to have the same result, and 1 iexplore.exe process showing in task manager.

I decided to install IE8 Beta, to see if this cured the problem, and following the necessary reboot, IE actually loaded and appeared to work fine. I thought the problem was fixed, but an hour later, my friend phoned to say he was having the same problem again. He had turned on his laptop (1-month old Dell), and tried to load IE without success. He looked in Task Manager and found 6 iexplore.exe processes running. He said he had tried to load IE twice since turning his laptop on, not 6 times.

It seems that something is trying to load IE repeatedly, but I am unable to figure out what or why. I could not find anything odd in the startup programs, and a spyware/virus check was negative.

I am going round to my friends' house tomorrow to try to resolve this, and would love to go armed with a number of approaches I hadn't previously considered, which is where I need your help. Currently, I am at a loss. I plan on running SFC and installing Firefox (so at least he may be able to browse the web), but can't really think of anything else to try.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and/or solutions.

One of the reasons why I switched to FF here at the office was because of that problem, even though I am running XP Pro w/SP3 here so I'll be interested to see the answers on this problem.

Thanks AstaLaVista, it's re-assuring to know that installing Firefox should cure the problem.

I've been exclusively using Firefox now for 3 years on my own computer, but as I do some web design in my spare time, I keep IE on my own computer purely for checking how my web-pages look in both browsers. I just find that Firefox is more stable, and has some really useful plugins, and I have not had any browser-related problems since I switched.

Of course, setting FF as the main browser on my friend's laptop probably won't prevent iexplore.exe from appearing several times in task manager. The longer his laptop is turned on, it seems the more iexplore.exe processes appear, which will cause memory/cpu usage problems after a while, so does anyone know if there is a 'How to uninstall IE' guide on these forums?

It seems that the laptop's power settings were causing it to go into sleep mode both when clicking the power button in the start menu, and also when pressing the physical power button on the laptop. This meant that the laptop was never actually shutting down, or even rebooting.

A full shutdown/reboot, however, cured the problem, and the power settings have now been modified in the control panel. This problem is therefore now solved. Not sure if this will help AstaLaVista or not though. Thanks for your help with this. I'll be watching the forums before I get my new Vista PC in January, so that I know more about what I am buying!