Admitedly, I'm a IE newbie having spent most of my browsing life using
Netscape and FF. Therefore, the questions I post may appear too simplistic to
even answer but I ask them only after an ernest attempt to find the answer
myself. Having said that:

It seems to me that IE is very slow opening, closing, switching tabs (as
compared with what I'm used to in FF, which is quite fast) and loading pages.
Sitching tabs seems to take 1-2 seconds. Opening a tab seems to take 2
seconds or more just to open the tab before the page begins to be fetched.
Loading a pages seems significantly slower than FF although I don't have any
numbers to back it up. Closing tabs is oftentimes very slow. There are times
when I'll stop the page loading then closing the tab may be quick. But, too
often it takes from several seconds to 15 seconds or more. Task Manager often
shows IE as not responding and the revolving circle takes over (I don't know
what to call the "circle" except "the-thing-that-replaced-the-hourglass").
Continued clicking on close only results in IE going gray and a dialog box
coming up telling me the application is not responding and giving me 3
choices, the only viable one being to wait. My system config is below. Is
there a SP, fix, or an IE config setting that will speed it up?