I once had this problem when I had a mega graphics file on my computer. When Internet Explorer would browse “My Documents” (which is where the file was located), computer performance went out the window. My CPU usage went to 100%, the computer crawled, and I couldn’t do anything. Also, if you looked at the amount of memory Internet Explorer was using, it kept growing and growing.

It took me quite a while to figure out that it was browsing that large graphic file that was causing the problem. Internet Explorer was trying (I presume) to create a thumb-nail image of the file and it was consuming everything my system had to attempt to make that thumbnail image.

My solution was this: Move that file to another folder and set that folder’s attributes so it did not create thumbnail images.

Perhaps you have a similar problem?