Internet Explorer 7 - First Page Slow to Load After Reboot

We've been using IE 7 with Windows XP Home edition for a few months now and have noticed that it is very slow to load our home page the first time it starts, after the computer has been started or rebooted. In fact, often it does not show the home page but displays a message saying it is unavailable. Clicking on refresh loads it right away. Every page after that loads just fine, it's just that first one. For clarity, IE 7 starts fine, it is just our home page that loads slowly the first time. Changing home pages does not make a difference. Every other time we start IE 7 the home page loads very quickly. Even after coming out of hibernation it loads fine. It is just that first time after restarting the computer that the home page does not load.

 

This is unique to IE 7. This did not happen with IE 6. Also, we've tried Firefox 2.0 and it also does not exhibit this behavior. We would make Firefox our default browser except that we use Norton Internet Security 2007 and Spybot 1.4. Both of these integrate well with IE 7 but not with Firefox. As a restult, we lose a significant degree of protection from phishing, spyware and adware by moving to Firefox; something we're not prepared to do.

 

Back to IE 7 and what we've tried so far. We have the phishing filter turned off (we use NIS 2007 - it's much quicker) and we have the "automatically detect settings" for the LAN unchecked. Those two changes improved the overall speed dramatically but did not eliminate the first time load issue. We've also tried emptying and not emptying the temporary internet folders on exit. We've also tried automatically looking for new pages and always looking for new pages. No difference in performance with any of these changes.

 

We have an Inspiron 6400 with T2400 1.83 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, ATI 1400 video card with 256 MB RAM, Windows XP Home. We are connecting to the internet with a wireless connection via our Intel Proset 3945 wireless card and a Linksys WRT54G wireless router and high speed cable.

 

Any ideas?