IE Connection Failing/Help!

[NYfile]

Ok, I have officially had it, lol.

I have a laptop running Vista. IE works fine for a while, then suddenly it hangs and hangs, and the circle by the mouse arrow keeps spinning, till you finally have to do a Restart.

This was barable for a while, but now it is happening too often and too quickly. The last time, even the AOL browser did not work, but I was able to sign on to AOL.

I admit I have not done a defrag or a scandisk since I bought the laptop, which is quite a while. I don't really use the machine for much aside from email, slingbox, etc. I am trying to get a defrag going (see my other post under Vista). Could lack of defrag or scandisk cause this?

I have run AVG, Super Anti Virus, Malaware Bytes, Adaware, and Spybot.

Please let me know if you can help. If I posted this in the wrong location, please let me know where else to post it.

THANKS!
NYF.