[Lover Grandpa]

I have a problem that Yahoo tabs refuse to close.

My computer is a WinBook J4 portable with 1GB RAM (max for this machine) and 2GHz operating speed.
I am running Windows XP Professional version 5.1, Service Pack 3.

I have Norton internet security software, and full system scan finds no problems. I have no reason to believe there is any intentional malware on the computer.

I am using "Windows Internet Explorer provided by Yahoo!" as my Web browser.
I open Yahoo Mail to read my email messages.
If one of the news article links looks interesting, I open it in a new tab.

After reading the article, I try to close that tab, and it appears to close.
But then I quickly have two more tabs trying to open the same news article, and sometimes this grows to an indefinite number of tabs. The new tabs are frequently title "blank tab" until they get enough data to restore their original names. Sometimes I get similar windows (not tabs in the same window) running the same page. Closing the bogus tabs/windows only results in doubling them again. Normal computer operation is effectively canceled because the computer is 100% busy (per Task Manager) processing the bogus web pages.

This does not happen every time, but frequently, approaching half the tabs I try to close.
Also I am not saying it never happens on non-Yahoo sites, but it is at least far less common. For example, I believe I have never had a problem closing a YouTube tab or window.

Sometimes (maybe always?) I can X the entire Explorer window, click "close all tabs", and it will gradually close all the web pages (bogus and legit) and disappear normally, maybe one or two minutes to close everything. This is a nuissance as I have to restart any good pages I had open. If I use Windows Task Manager to kill Explorer, the computer remains unavailable for an extended time while processing a dump report that I didn't ask for unless I also kill the dump report Process that is then using 100% of my CPU time.

Is this a known problem, and if so what is causing it? My suspicion is that the special Yahoo edition of Windows Internet Explorer is causing the problem by continuously pre-loading web data "to improve the performance" of my system, and it has a bug the pre-loads data from the closed window. If so, it is ironic that the bug primarily ruins use of Yahoo-associated web pages!!! This has been going on for some time, and unfortunately I do not know when I first loaded the Yahoo "upgrade".

Is there a good way to re-install standard Microsoft Internet Explorer?