For me at least, but I suspect others will be suffering from the same problem.
Having spent over 2 weeks trying to find the source of this problem, I finally bit the bullet and formatted and re-installed.
I run a dual boot system with Win98SE and XP Pro.
Having fully re-installed 98, I went on to doing XP. Having got all the drivers in, I went through getting all the Windows Updates. For my machine, there are 14 critical, 43 non-critical, and 2 driver updates.
I got as far as having done all the critical, 41 of the non-critical, and both drivers when it started happening again. The driver updates are for the processor driver and my sound chip.
I started uninstalling the updates - till I got so far back I knew it wasn't one of them. I finally narrowed it down to one of the driver updates.
I've just spent the last 24 hours doing it all over again as uninstalling some of those updates makes a right mess of the others.
I've installed every update bar the drivers and the connection is now fine.
It's 99% certain it's a conflict between the sound driver and one of the windows updates. It would take me about a month to pin it down for definite, but there are several clues knocking around.
When you process windows 98 updates, there's one in there that cures a problem with I.E. sounds and specifically refers to the fact that when a navigation button with a sound is clicked, it freezes. This is almost exactly what is happening in XP with the updated sound driver. This is despite the fact that the new driver is WHQL certified (they should tighten that up
). No equivalent fix for XP though..
The bottom line is that if you're experiencing this connection freeze when you press a button on the site, go get a different sound card driver. I'm using the original from my CD which is about 6 months old and my connection is once again rock solid.