IE 64 extremely slow to load pages

I recently bought XP x64, which comes with both IE 32 bit and IE 64 bit. At first, either IE version was about as fast as the other so I went with 32 bit as I found it be better supported (plug-ins and the like is what I mean).

Now, just last week, I decided to give 64 bit a new try but for some reason it has got extremely slow in the meantime. Just loading the home page is taking up to 20 seconds and the same goes for any further pages that I want to download - it does not seem to matter which.

As 64 bit is supposed to be in fact faster, this does not make any sense at all. Other than installing three Linux distributions on this pc, I cannot think of anything that may have affected XP - and I doubt whether even that has had any effects at all. Oh yes, I also replaced Outlook Express with MS Outlook but again I wonder whether this has got anything to do with it.

Does this issue sound familiar to anyone? Is there a way to check / repair /reinstall just the 64 bit version?

Thanks for any help.

 

Well, now that I come to think of it, I did have something of a hardware conflict a few weeks ago when I was installing a Promise IDE controller card.
XP came up but it crashed within seconds. I did some research and found out that XP64 does not know how to handle 32 bit device drivers so I simply disabled the card under device manager. That did solve the problem (I did not really need the card under XP anyway, only for Linux) but maybe it hurt IE64 in some way?

Still, the browser is not broken. It is just taking an awfully long time to load pages (as opposed to launching - this is as fast as IE 32bit). I said 20 seconds but I just verified and it is actually taking at least twice that time to load any page.

And, by the way, XP came pre-installed on a brand new pc so I do not think that I am supposed to (re)load any drivers. Especially as I did not have this issue at first.

 

Hello Steve,

No, I did not do any reformating. XP64 came pre-installed on this pc (and so did both 32 and 64 bit IE). So it is not that I upgraded from regular XP or reinstalled XP64 or anything.

I did shrink the XP partition to 60GB but I have not noticed any other issues so I doubt whether this has anything to do with it.

What is really weird is that I use 64 bit browsers only under Linux - without any problem whatsoever.

So maybe IE64 was corrupted at some point? Which is why I was wondering how I should go about repairing or reinstalling it (preferably without reinstalling all of XP)