Completely unrelated to anything on this site, I wanted to talk about IE8 for a minute. It looks like a great browser, but on my home machine, just spinning up a tab took about 3 seconds. When I noticed that other people did not have this problem, I started to investigate. These are the two tips that I’ve found:

The first is by Ed Bot and basically tells you to execute ‘regsvr32 actxprxy.dll’ from an elevated command prompt. That registers a dll that in certain configurations is not registered. It can make a huge difference.

The second on is the the one that saved me. I don’t know the source, but there are several blogs telling you to look at your restricted sites (Tools/InternetOptions/Security/Restricted Sites, press the button labeled ‘sites’ ).
I had used spybot long ago, which had added a huge list of sites there. Apparently this can really slow down outlook and ie!
Remove them by resetting your settings to default (Advanced tab, button labeled ‘reset’).

Now I have a blindingly fast internet explorer, and I must admit, I do love this browser now. Switching back!