Internet Explorer freezes

Hello gurus:

Whenever I open Internet Explorer, I get the message "Internet Explorer has
encountered a problem and needs to close." Then I have to use the Task Manager to manually close it. I do not know why this is happening. Can somebody advise me please?
I almost never use IE actually, but still it shouldn't be acting up this way, so I would like to fix it.

My PC is a Pentium 4, 3.2GHZ
1GB of RAM.
O/S: Win XP Home SP2
Internet Explorer version 6

Thanks.

 

Why not go ahead and update IE to version 7? That might solve the problem.