IE Delay

Well done, you found a workaround in Firefox.

Did you find any spyware? If you did find some, and even if you did not find any, it would be useful to run a couple of different spyware scanners, e.g. Microsoft's Windows AntiSpyware Beta Edition and Spybot Search&Destroy to scrub your system clean.

Are your Windows updates uptodate? Apparently there have been few issues with the latest ones.

Have you inspected the event logs after the problem occurs?

It would be useful to have the Task Manager running when you access new pages in IE. Any significant changes in the information and graphs displayed under the tabs Processes, Performance and Networking may give more clues of what is going on.

most likely some spyware or a plugin broke something in IE that is causing the delay. reinstall IE.

You've done most of what I would have suggested. Here are a few more steps.

Go to Internet Options. On the connections tab, click LAN settings and then uncheck "automatically detect settings." While you're there be sure there isn't a proxy server that is unnecessary.

On the general tab click settings and then lower the number of "amount of disk space to use" to 20 MB. The reason is that when IE loads a website it first looks to the cache to try and bring it up quicker. However, going through too much offline data actually slows the process down.

After that; be sure IE is updated to version 6; and be sure you get the most recent windows updates as well.

Any of these will help, but I'll bete you that the "automatically detect" is the problem.

Cheers!

sounds like you are still hijacked...did you run HiJack This to see if you have any hosts files redirecting things?
i like to watch lower left 'status' on IE right as i hit Go to watch where it really goes.
you may have a reinfesting type of spyware, especially if the problem gets rapidly worse...
since it is so predictable in your case, i wonder if all you need to do is IE/Tools/Internet Options/Programs/Reset Web Settings...

Thanks for all the help and I have found there is more to the story. Answer 1 reminded me to go to the event viewer which led me to more info. I am having event id 8032 and 8021 happen. This indicates it is a backup browser.
This computer is a client of Windows Server 2003.
I had changed the DNS to the server IP then the provider's DNS because this computer was having a problem accessing \\{servername}. That had solved that problem and created this one. As soon as I changed DNS back to automatic the IE delay problem went away. Now I have to find out how to solve both problems.
This may be beyond the scope of my original question. I will wait to hear comments before I possibly post to a different topic.