IE8 becomes sluggish, freezes

Vista Home Premium SP2 / 32 bit
Avast Antivirus Pro 5 - trial version
Windows Firewall
2MB RAM
320 GB HD

A few days ago I installed trial version of Online Armor Premium Firewall. Later that day Secunia psi advised that I needed to update Adobe Flash and Shockwave Players so I attempted to do that. Soon after IE8 became almost totally unresponsive. On my home page and on the page I used to test Adobe Flash Player I noticed a little notation that said Online Armor was blocking this ActiveX and if I wanted to run this to click "here." I did click and run it, whatever it was, but it would just appear again.

I checked Task Manager/Processes and I had 8 instances of iexplore.exe taking a lot of memory.

I went into Safe Mode (recommended) to uninstall Online Armor, rebooted into Normal Mode, activated my Windows Firewall, un-and reinstalled Adobe Flash and Shockwave and everything was back to normal.

But IE still freezes and becomes unresponsive, although not anything comparable to what it was doing. I just checked Task Manager again and there are 5 instances of iexplore.exe taking up approx 170,000 KB of memory.

I did a full scan with Avast today. Last evening I did a full scan with Malwarebytes and a full scan with SUPERAntiSpyware, which found 10 tracking cookies. Otherwise nothing. Can anyone help me figure out what could be going on with this IE8?

Just a hunch but give this a try
Tools
Internet Explorer
Advanced
Reset
This will remove all the add ons, which can be restored later.

I think I already did this but will give it a try and let you know.

I could have sworn I used to have two items in add ons for Sun Java and now there is only one there. Do you know?

IE8 just isn't working right and I have no idea what has changed to cause this. I reset IE and it did seem to help a little, but the problem has not been solved. Sometimes it takes forever to load a page. I clicked on a link in an email this morning. First it took quite a while for IE to even open and then forever to open the link. I was just getting ready to open Task Manager and "End Process" when, much to my surprise, the page opened.

I've been using Firefox a lot because IE is performing so horribly, but I really prefer IE. If anyone has any ideas I could check out I would appreciate your help.