Internet explorer crashes

I am havin a grand ole time at the moment, nearly everytime I'm online, then after a while and during a disk operation, then my computer crashes, and completely freezes up, I have a funny feelin this has something to do with IE but, I wos wondering if anyone could help?

 

What versions of Windows and Internet Explorer are you using?
When did this start? Had you installed any new software/hardware just before?
Do the crashes regularly occur after a certain number of minutes? Are you doing the same thing each time it crashes? (If so, what? What is a "Disk Operation "?)
Are you getting any error messages?
I guess you have heard about the Blaster worm, which affects Win 2000, NT and XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/sec

 

my version of XP is Professional vers 2002, my Internet explorer is vers 6.0.2600.000.xpclient.010817-1148IS. The problem seems to have started about 2 weeks ago, and I don't think I installed any new software, definately didn't install any new hardware. There's no set time for the crashes, it could happen after 30 secs or half an hour or more, but I did check my drive to see if that msblast.exe file was present, like was suggested in the Symantec website, but there seems to be no sign of it.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason for it because I not doing the same thing everytime, except mabye saving file to the hard drive sometimes(disk operation). And there are no error messages, coz it just completely freezes out of the blue

 

peeriefish--I am not the best person to help, since I run Win98. I certainly hope some one more knowledgeable about XP will chime in.
Recognizing that I do not know much about WinXP, Win98 offers Internet Explorer Repair Tool (fixie.inf). I do not know what your equivalent is.
One final comment I can make is that your version of IE6 could probably be updated. I run 6.0.2800.1106. Have you gone to Windows Update recently?