IE buttons won't work after period of time

[dataDude]

When I first open IE, everything runs just fine. Normally I'll begin with e-mails and then go on to other sites. After a while (not a set time after use), buttons in my browser will begin to cease their functionality, no warning, no error messages - they just die. This is only a recent problem, but it's not good. My e-mail, online class, and as we all know this site itself all depend on button functionality (for login mainly). The only way I've seen to fix it temporarily is by closing all the browser windows and then opening a window again and going to the site once more. Like I said, it's temporary; it'll do it again and again. What's going on?

[glc]

How often do you delete your temporary internet files, and how much space do you have allocated for them?

[dataDude]

The temporary internet files get deleted a lot (I have a program that automatically deletes them when the user closes the browser). The amount of space I have allocated for the files is about 10 MB.

Something to note: today I downloaded and am trying the Opera browser. As of yet I haven't had any trouble with it, but I still want to know what's wrong with the IE browser (never know if/when I might have to uninstall Opera; tried Firefox, it became unstable very quickly). Again, can anyone help?

Oh, my system specs:
Win XP w/ SP1 & hotfixes
100 GB HDD (about 70 GB free at the moment)
1 GB RAM
Athlon 2800+ XP (not overclocked)

One other thing to note is that on some of the pages I go to via Opera, buttons that show up upon first page load are effective at that time. The moment I scroll or put focus on any object that's not a button will somehow cause the button(s) to cut off and become ineffective. Anyone have an idea about that?

[glc]

I'd increase the TIF space to at least 50 megs - it's possible they are filling up during your session and it's having a hard time kicking the old stuff out the bottom. The 3rd party program may be preventing it too - IE has a native selection to do just that in Advanced.

[Statica]

Running additional software to do the tasks that are natively supported by existing software makes your system run bloated and gives rise to more issues. Now you no longer have to troubleshoot IE, but you have to troubleshoot the helper apps that you've installed.