I'm wondering whether IE is the actual problem, could it be that something is trying to kick off IE in order to access the Internet in some way, and it's that which is triggering the response because the system sees that as an unauthorized access?
Yeah, AVG is continually reporting infected files every few hours, and one of them being a trojan that has infected a "white listed" file, which is apparently a vital system file that is dangerous to remove. I havn't had any trouble other than a slight performance slowdown and some game crashes from this "virus", though.
It does give me a random beep from time to time, though...the default windows beep you get from like when you're asked a question during installation of a game.