You can avoid these problems by downloading the IE 5.5 files to your hard disk and installing from there. The most common problem report, though, involves slow performance, both in browsing Web pages and in opening Outlook Express. I did not have the problems downloading it others have had, but that is the ONLY good thing I can say about it. IE 5.5 took almost a minute to come up. Word takes two to three seconds longer to load a document.
Access seems to take about twice as long.
In general, one reader pointed out, those who are experiencing slowdowns tend to be running with 64MB of memory or less. If you've got plenty of memory and relatively recent hardware, you're a good candidate for the IE 5.5 upgrade. In that case, follow the freshly updated advice in my Internet Explorer Setup Secrets article. If you don't want to take the chance, though, stick with IE 5.01 SP1, which includes all the latest security fixes. Without exception, every user who has reported problems with IE 5.5 has had no troubles whatsoever with IE 5.01.