IE7 Crashing (on close)

Help me out here, guys! I am having the same issue. I've reset IE7, reinstalled IE, reinstalled Adobe Flash player, showckwave player, etc. Nothing seems to work.

Easiest replication: open a web site with a flash thingie on ie, scrollwheel-click on a link so that a new tab is opened, refresh the page, move to the opened tab and close it while the first tab is loading. Now IE is apparently frozen, with no error message. However, after a short while (not right away) I can close it either by right clicking on the taskbar button and selecting Close or going to the close X button. The X button is clickable, everything else is frozen. If I switch task to another application then back again to the faulty IE the window and the minimize/max/close buttons appear, but the inside is completely white.

By examining the Internet Explorer task with Process Explorer, I get to see that IE is stuck in '!CreateThread+0x2e' and if I watch the stack for that thread, the last line is !RegisterWaitForInputIdle+0x49.

The CPU is not used at all and the state of the thread is Wait:UserRequest. If I kill the thread, the window and taskbar button disappear completely, while the IE task is still in the task list.

I forgot to mention that this is happening ever since installing Windows XP SP3 and did not happen before.

.. and I am replicating the bug even with IExplore.exe -extoff !

Yatta! I have solved the issue! It is from Google Toolbar. Something in Windows XP Service Pack 3 messes up something in the Google Toolbar and makes this happen. If you encounter this situation uninstall Google Toolbar, do not install Windows XP SP3 or at least try to disable the Google Toolbar popup blocker ( I guess that's where the bug is coming from, but I am not sure because I don't want to install the bar again )