My IE7 / 8 slow tab/new window problem (resolved)

[BearUK]

Here's a tale for everyone that thinks their PC has a virus or malware.
-----
I have a new (refurb) Lenovo Thinkcentre PC. Its a Dual core 2.33GHz processor and I've installed a total of 4GB of RAM.

It came with IE7 and I immediately installed IE8, but opening new tabs and windows was very slow, so I went back to IE7. The problem persisted.

I have just restored the system using the Lenovo Vista Business Sp1 recovery CDs, so apart from the 'extras' installed by Lenovo I have a clean PC without even an antivirus program, and IE7 is still slow.

I also have a 5 year old Athlon based laptop running Windows XP Pro. The laptop has 512MB of RAM, yet my new IE8 installation opens new tabs and windows with only a momentary delay, not the average 5 seconds it takes my new higher spec Lenovo.

I read through this forum for ideas and the end result was a couple of addons installed by Lenovo were slowing down my browser.

The addons included with my IE7 install were

ThinkVantage password manager
Sun Java Console
Adobe PDF Reader Link Helper
CPwmIEBrowserHelper Object (Lenovo inc)
SSV Helper Class (Sun)

Disabling the lenovo addons were the cause of my slow browser (I haven't bothered to check but I think the CPwm addon is the culprit). Its unfortunate I had to reformat my entire system before I discovered this, but at least it was only a week old and the restore DVDs were more recent than the restore partition on my hard drive.