Explorer 8 headache

Hi, I’m having a lot of problems with explorer 8 out of nowhere. I don’t visit any dodgy sites, just youtube, ebay and some other safe sites so I don’t think I’ve been infected with a virus. I was infected with a Trojan once last year and that reduced the security settings in explorer but that hasn’t happened this time. The computer is new only a couple of months old with Windows 7 and explorer 8, I’ve tried to go back with system restore but restore failed.

The problem is that when I open multiple tabs, the new tab will freeze, sometimes immediately and other times after a minute or so. Trying to close them doesn’t work, and that causes to first tab to freeze and I have to right click and close explorer. After this happens, I can’t access internet options through explorer after restarting it, I have to access the options through the control panel and delete the browsing history before I can access options through explorer. I checked the restore points and the first was today for a critical update, that worked but there was no change with the problem, next restore point was 5 days ago and that failed due to an unspecified error (I think that’s what it said). Could the critical update cause this?

 

im having the same exact problem and cannot find the fix. still looking though

 

i have found when i opened task manager after a reboot, i had 2 internet explorers running which i have not even tried to open .i stopped both processes and so far i haven't had any more problems. lets hope it stays that way. i do not know why they were running,i started my computer and never opened IE8.