Internet 7 in Vista Home Premium

Lately I have been experiencing some extremely annoying traits in IE7 running on my home quad core 3GB RAM pc. And I am wondering what the hell is going on?

I am in my favourite football forum and then I get a window with "this program is closing down" - "do you want to: finish program or restatrt IE?" WHAT!!!

I am in forum(s) of all sorts being it football, this one, or another. I find that it has not saved my log in, a habit I use. I log back in and then come into a particlular section to post - "you are not logged in, please log in" AAAGGGHHH!!!

MY daughter has a photo account with Boots online. She uses a small uploading program provided by the company. Suddenly, it does not want to work and goes into the close down procedure described above. So I joined it to see, the same thing.

Obviously there are programs clashing head on with IE7 but the thing is, the same Boots program did not work with Firefox either?????

I have emailled Boots twice, with zero response.

Edit: I had just spotted two typo's so pressed edit to fix - and found myself back on the site home page with - yes, no log in!! Logged back in and it refused me, so logged back in and it succeeded.

Has anybody else experienced this phenomenon in Vista driven pc's?

Update:

After over an hour with a very helpful technician from Hewlett Packard the results were not promising.

We did 2 complete system restores of which neither went in.
Completely cleared out IE7, temp files, cookies, everything and did a reset to system default.

Nothing.

Then after consultation with his "mentor" - they decided an install of Vista SP1 would possibly solve it. Now the install is complete and everything is fine - except IE7

No Change.

Then an email arrived from boots. The software uploader is not compatible with this version of Internet Explorer and should be disabled, proceeding to tell me how.

Problem: It was working fine with IE7 until this week! Which gives me reason to believe that the problem could have been caused by an update. I have since disabled Windows Auto Update so I can keep tabs on what goes into my pc.