i use firefox browser. IE is on the desktop but i never use it, my wife sometimes does.
My system is windows XP sp3.
A better description of the problem is:
1. sometimes no website will load and windows task manager shows only system idle processes running at 90 % or more.
2. when this happened if I opened fbi.gov in another tab then other websites will open right away and firefox operates normally.
3. Last year i had some strange RAT trojan symptoms like windows opening on their own with messages displayed such as " what do you know, it works". After this I started using Panda antivirus and malwarebytes. Panda then started acting strange with the chinese characters in message boxes etc.
I then switched to Avast and although it did not find anything the system has been running better except for occasionally not being able to load any websites as described above.
My Encoding settings in Firefox allow pages to choose what they want for a font and the default is Comic Sans MS.
Character encoding default is Western (ISO 8859-1)