IE7 and slow opening sites/or non opening sites

Well, I have the odd site that won't open, just get the background, or some
you could wait for the cows to come home for them to open. My work around
was to just use firefox which had no problems with said sites. Just on a
lark 'cause I got fed up with seeing IE7 display "detecting proxy setting"
everytime I started it up, I went into tools/internet settings/connections
and in the Lan part unchecked "auto detect"... lo and behold, the balky
sites now work just fine and IE7 fires up right away.