I'm beginning to suspect that it's some issue with memory consumption,
because whenever I display that page, Windows starts showing all kinds
of signs of memory starvation: menus appear without text and no icons,
starting even a small application pops up a message saying there
wasn't enough memory to run it, etc. Curiously enough, closing that
page seems to release only 2MB of memory, which seems to contradict
the above diagnosis (exiting IE releases 12MB).
This is a Windows 98 box with 64MB of main RAM and 530MB of free swap
space, so memory problems is not something I'd expect. The system is
quite stable (it runs for days, sometimes weeks on end without being
shut down and without crashing), so system-specific problems are also
a remote possibility.
Are there perhaps any guidelines in Web page design howto's as to the
maximum recommended number of pull-down menus (of the kind you produce
on that page) per page? Can you perhaps set up a similar page with a
smaller number of menus, so that we could experiment with different
numbers and see whether the problem is indeed related to that number?
Anyway, all I can say about this is ``weird''. I never saw anything
similar before. I will try some other browser when I have time.