Sammyk
I had exactly the same problem with my present computer sometime back.
I was running 98SE with 512mb of RAM and a seperate partition for the swapfile and IE5 on a 56k modem.
Since then I have done the following:-
1. Reformatted and clean instal of 98SE
2. Installed Cacheman to handle the 512mb of RAM that
98SE finds very difficult to manage. The link is
3. Upgraded to IE6+SP1
4. Limited the background programs to system tray, norton
firewall, norton AV, Cacheman and nopops.
5. Made sure that there was nothing scheduled in Task
Manager.
6. I empty out the Temp Internet folder and defrag on a
frequent basis.
Running this setup I do not get any slowdown in an IE session that previously required rebooting at least once per logon.
I found that some of the worst programs for messing up an internet session were Tkbelle, Still Image monitor, Task Monitor and Real Player amongst others, this is why I limited the startup programs to the absolute minimum.
Hope this helps, it was the solution for my internet problems.
Brian