Hello,
I have been having some trouble with the program execution speed of internet explorer. After I double click the icon, it takes approximately 4 minutes for it to actually start up. No other program that I currently have seems to have this same problem. As far as I know I have done nothing out of the ordinary and that would be the occasional defragment, disk scan, emptying of the internet files through the properties of internet explorer and such. There doesn't seem to be any other program running in the background and before this has never happened. Some help would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Omochi, SWAG, adware/spyware. Be aware that ME and XP both have a feature called 'Restore'. A nasty (virus, spyware, etc) can hide there and since it is a 'Windows' file, Windows won't allow any alteration so long as it is active. The registry gets re-written on the next bootup and the last successful boot is used and since nasties don't count, the boot appears to be sucessful, thus a 'nasty' gets replicated.
The solution is simple (assuming that's the problem), TEMPORARILY disable Restore (in order to 'unprotect'), scan/clean, re-enable restore and try again. May have to reboot.
During the disable process, you will destroy ALL your restore points, thus some folks disagree with that fix, feeling that any restore point (even a corrupted one!) is better than none at all. You can sidestep that pitfall by creating a new restore point as soon as you have a clean machine. FWIW, I have used it on both ME & XP Pro with no lasting ill effects.
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

A few thoughts:

1. Yes, try the spyware and adware thing.

2. If not, try repairing IE - Control panel, Add/Remove programs, Microsoft Internet Explorer, click add/remove, select Repair Internet Explorer

3. Try using Firefox instead - it's a totally brilliant browser, free, and far better than IE. You can get it here
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Try running SCANDISK in Thorough mode. There could be a soft disk read error causing delay in loading IE.