Vista - ie crash when site plays sound

My girlfriend has a new laptop with Vista Home Premium and when she visits sites that contain mid, mp3 etc music that plays in the backround of the site IE crashs, well hangs. It does not finish loading the site and just stops responding. I originaly thought it was a java issue and dep but after following what a forum said it turns out not to be that.
If I go into internet options, advanced, multimedia and untick play sounds in web page the sites work fine, or if I go to internet options, security, enable protected mode and untick that the site works with sound but im not sure what ive lost by turning this off. I have tested it on a vista laptop at work that runs ultimate and that does not have the problem.
does anyone know why this is happeing and is there a fix.
Thanks

Lee

I also encountered this, but on XP with IE7. Each time I visit to a site playing sound, the IE will freeze. On my other computer, XP with IE6, I never encountered this.