The big deal occurred when this message popped up as my site began to load:
I wasn't sure what to do but didn't give it much thought as we found something else to occupy our time. It wasn't until last night that the problem slapped me in the face again. Someone called and I wanted to share one of my posts with them. I knew their browser was IE but surely that problem that occurred a few weeks back wasn't going to happen again. Wrong! Same message. Same failure to load my blog.
There's really no way to determine how many people this problem prevented from finding this way cool blog of mine. In reviewing my stats, the browser share revealed this
72% of my blogs traffic was arriving via Firefox with only 17.5% arriving via IE (6, 7 and 8 combined!). This may be due, in part, to more Firefox users but something tells me the message below had a lot to do with it.
After searching the cyber highway up one side and down the other, I finally discovered the problem. Thanks to a post I found at Speedcat Hollydale Page. It was almost too simple to be true.
The Google Friend Connect/Followers was causing the problem. He goes into the specifics as to why but all I needed to hear/read was REMOVE THIS WIDGET! That's what I did and PRESTO - my blog is loading without any problems via IE...(anxious to see how those browser share stats change)...
If you've been experiencing this problem, I certainly hope this post was helpful...a bit long winded but helpful just the same.
Happy Blogging
**Update - Less than 24 hours after correcting this problem the difference is already evident -
Traffic from IE has gone from a 17.5% to 23% 
