I like to relax by playing video games. My game of choice is Team Fortress 2. So, when I started randomly crashing when entering different servers and game play became too choppy to play if I did get in I was pretty upset. This happened on Windows 7 and Vista, so I wasn’t sure where the problem laid. My gut reaction was my hardware was failing or one of the latest hardware drivers was bad. However, I realized that I had installed IE8 on Vista and that Windows 7 comes with IE8. I’m a fanatic Internet Download Manager fan and it always installed and I remembered an issue I had when Vista was first released. At that time Steam would lockup upon opening. The trick then was to disable IE integrated in IDM and what do you know that did the trick. Several TF2 servers display a home page that is HTML based when you join, just like Steam renders its content using HTML. However, the Steam issue has been long fixed (not sure by which party) so this caught me by surprise. Choppy game play was a separate issue. I recently switched from AVG to Forefront, so it was aggressively scanning my game files for viruses and the like. Simply adding HL2.exe to the list of processes and the files it uses from being scanned did the trick.