Connection Problems IE6

[#1]

I am running a Draytek 2600+ router and we have 3 machines connected to it.  Over the past few months we have had this problem, we can open IE6 on any machine but when you try to connect any site nothing happens, it just sits there. If it does open the site after a few minutes every site connected through that window is very slow.  If we close IE and reopen it and then try to connect again, sometimes the same thing happens, other times its an instant connection and all is fine.  This problem is getting worse, could anyone come up with any ideas as to why?  As it happens an all our computers I assume its a router or external problem?
Thanks.

[#2]

Have you tried using another browser like Firefox?

[#3]

Have you tried rebooting the router?
You could also try specifying DNS servers directly in the connection settings on the PC as it could be an issue with the 2600+'s DNS caching.  (Your router will hand out its IP address as the DNS server to all your machines if  they're picking up IP addresses by DHCP.)

[#4]

We only have Firefox on one machine and that doesn't seem to have the problem.  We have IE7 on another machine and thats ok too but I need to have IE6 as I do website work and use it to make sure things look ok.  The DNS addresses are all manually set on all machines, I tried letting the computer find its own settings but that made no difference.  rebooting the router doesn't change anything either!  You can begin to see why its confusing me!

[#5]

As an experiment you could install this IE tester which has each IE renderer built in to see if that helps http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

[#6]

This seems very similar to a problem I asked about here : Little trouble with browser connections.
It's just not IE7 that it happens with, it could also be upgrades, etc. It's still not resolved

[#7]

Can you try opening IE6 and going to Tools>Internet Options and clicking on the Connections Tab.
Under Local Area Network click on the LAN settings tab.  On the screen that follows make sure that no boxes are ticked.

[#8]

You dont need to have IE6 on your pc to test web  pages you can test web pages in hundreds or browsers here
http://browsershots.org/
It does them all in one go IE6 is probably part of the problem You could also use a virtual pc to test webpages but the website is the best as you can test for browsers you never even knew existed