As I have told, I met the same problem of IE crash and today I have found out that it was the Flash Player. Though it was not te main cause but many got affected. I thought it was the problem of IE itself so I rolled back to IE 6. Could not take the hook off the problem, but at least I was revealed to the real cause. The old IE 6 displayed an error with the flash.ocx file, which is the Adobe Flash Player. So, the solution is, go to give your IE an update of the flash player. I got and install the currently latest version which is a Release Candidate, version 10.0 something and it finally rectifies the problem. And I have got IE 8 beta 2 now. Thanks to everyone!

We would have known immediately if it was a problem with a plugin if using the '-extoff' cvar allowed the websites to load.

Also with a memory dump we would have seen in the stack trace a failure in the ocx module.

But kudos for the information and for figuring it out!