I'm Going To Murder My Computer. Please Help.

Okay, so that might be a little extreme - it's not the computer's fault. Plus it's brand new. But I think I might be the victim of some nastiness.

I am using windows 2k, IE6, cable modem. Virus program is AVG, which has run last week (last). I have an expired version of ewidow that still works but can only manually start it.

Now. Since getting the new machine last month, I've not had any major issues. I've installed what I considered trusted programs, and a couple I wasn't positive about, just seeing about them. It doesn't appear any of those are the culprit, but I'm not completely positive.

The problem started today, first time. I was online checking a few sites on HTML anchor tags because I totally forgot inline links on a different document, when I clicked some page of a guy with a tutorial.

BAM!

Next thing I know duplicates of his page were popping up in new browser windows filling up the screen, couldn't delete them...had to reboot.

No problems for most of the night. Working on a site I did awhile ago, revamping it, I was checking a links page to see if they were still active or not and clicked on one I believe had been an about.com page.

BAM! same thing happened again...scores of them. Not different pages, not ads, but duplicates of the page I'd clicked to - regular web page.

I had a couple windows updates install this week but they are auto install so I don't know what they were. I've not tried to use IE7 beta since I'm using win2k. I ran AVG but it came up clean (but it always does, I wonder if that even works worth a damn or not...or if it's really that exceptional?). I checked startup.ini and nothing freaky or unusual is showing up. All are standard windows programs. I'd already disabled all the other stuff. I've checked my user profiles just to be sure nobody else is hiding out in there - and it's just the main 3 that ordinarily show up. Admin, main and guest.

I'm going to run AVG again shortly since this just happened again, but barring something showing up, I'm stumped.

Is this a virus? Malware? Hack attack? ANy idea what (which) it is and how to get rid of it (in dumbass terms, preferably, I'm not a geek yet).

Or is it some glitch in the system that'd make it wig out and spam me with 50 duplicate browser windows filling up the screen?

Thanks

Ms P