Repeating freeze

This happened to me twice in the last three days. I had about three ie windows open and when I go to the desktop to make a new text doc to paste some text into from a page the system freezes when I click new text doc from the right click menu. The cpu doesn't go to 100% like some loops because my digidoc reports constant idle temps. I have to reset the system to get back going. What the **** is going on?

I had a similar problem running Win98SE and IE 5.5. I resolved the problem by reloading windows from scratch. I tried everything else before that with no luck.