Recently I noticed how opening Internet Explorer resulted in a blank screen with a "Waiting for google.com" message up near the top of the screen. It doesn't load if I wait, but hitting "stop" and reloading brings it up just fine. A little experimenting revealed the issue goes away if I disable the avast! Online Security add-on. I gave me no such problems in October and Firefox has no such issues. All the scans I've run say I'm clean, which makes me suspect this is some sort of conflict with the IE Webrep Loader rather than an infection. But since you're the experts, I thought I'd bring it up to you to see what you think.