Why does my microsoft internet explorer keep freezing up?

I'm not sure what version of internet explorer I have, but lately I keep having to go to the task manager and shut it down because it has frozen up. Also, since this has been happening, I have noticed that after the comp has been "at rest" for a while, when I go to the little row of icons at the bottom there are always several icons for the java thing (little coffe cups) when I try to click on them it goes to hide mode and they dissappear one by one till they are all gone. I have run my spybot and adware se personal as well as the pc-cillian and have norton anti virus. I dont understand what is going wrong. I thought I had the most protected pc in the land!!!!

Why does my microsoft internet explorer keep freezing up?liveupdate

It sounds like you have a lot of stuffs running in your system tray. You should configure your internet explorer to make sure you are not allowing software to be installed into your PC without your permission. If you suspect Java is your probably, you can also temperay turn that off. Open IE, under Tools, select Internet Options..., then click on the Advanced tab.

Another thing to try is to do a selective startup. From Start menu, select Run... Type msconfig. Follow the prompt to un-select things that you don't want to load at startup. Then reboot and try IE again. If everything fail, you should download the latest version of IE from microsoft.com and re-install it.