Hmm... before recovering, did you try restoring IE to its default settings?

No, darn it, that sounds like an amazingly obvious, yet effective, attempt yet my dumb ass didn't think of it.

If it happens again, I hope I remember it then.

Guessing that's done under Internet Options???

EDIT: Ok, found it. Internet Options on the Advanced Tab. THANK YOU!

I pinpointed my earlier "Win7 crashes on me with a light-blue screen" problems to using Firefox, as I noticed that they happened only when Firefox was active. Now that I am using exclusively IE as the browser on this laptop, no problems whatsoever. I first thought the culprit was e.g. WebEx client, but they happened also without it.

It could still well be that FF isn't really the culprit but there is something else wrong on this laptop that FF just happens to trigger, but since it is fully stable without FF no matter what else I do with the computer, I just don't use it anymore.

I don't have similar problems on my other PCs with Firefox (running XP). There I in fact prefer FF because the latest IE versions cannot apparently be installed on XP anymore.

One thing I dislike in FF though: it seems to accumulate all kinds of add-ons (plug-ins) that I don't remember installing there myself, and which I don't even know what they are supposed to do. Maybe there is an easy way to remove them all, but as said, I don't know if I really need them.