IE does crash more on this site than on any other, for me as well.
But it does not do it very often.

Have you tried deleting cookies and internet temp files?

I'm not sure exactly how the web team has it coded, but if it was made with IE7 in mind, you shouldn't have that problem there (it has native support for PNG alpha-transparency, making the png 'fixer' unneeded). May be worth a try if you're having problems on IE6.

And of course, there's always Firefox as well (my personal choice).

Forget IE.

Get Firefox:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

You wont be sorry you did.
It's amazingly good, tabbed browsing, user-friendly, stability is great and you get to add cool add-ons to it. The security is well cool too.

Thanks, I'll probably give IE7 a try. I use Mozilla at work sometimes and don't really care for it. Fonts and page layouts often seem to come out messed up. Not quite sure what the mozilla / firefox difference is if there is any. I'm kind of a minimalist and since IE is there no matter what you do, I may as well use it as install something else. I do appreciate Elwoods bug free comment though, because I do hate Microsoft.

I can see this thread turning into a browser pissing contest pretty quickly, so I'll add my two cents before it gets too long for anyone to bother reading. Get Opera! It's rock solid and insanely customisable.

Get Opera!

This dll issue that Mumblefratz gets is almost certainly an IE6 and below issue. Like every IE6 issue, there is an army of overfrustrated web devs out there who must find a work around for it. Can you give a particular thread where IE6 ALWAYS hangs or crashes?

Of course, this is just the sort of error that a web dev would deliberately ignore to try and push people to better browsers

Can you give a particular thread where IE6 ALWAYS hangs or crashes?

It's not always but the longer the thread the more likely. It also seems that it relates to the complexity of what you're doing such as replying to a topic or editing a reply with perhaps another window open googling something else. Also it seems more likely to happen during high traffic periods. The thread I've most noticed it on is the America: Freedom to Fascism thread, but any multi-page thread with a lot of posts on the final page will probably do.

The thing is that this is relatively new behaviour. The GalCiv2 site has always seemed a bit buggy, but up until 1 or 2 days ago it was a matter of a server unavailable every other day or so, no real big deal plus not a crash. Now it seems, it could crash 3 or 4 times while trying to make a single reply, then not crash for the next 4 replies and so on. This has only been for the last two days or so, very strange.

Actually, I've switched over to https://forums.stardock.com to view these threads and noticed that I have no issue there. The difference being that medals are not displayed there. Has something recently changed about the way medals are displayed?

I do miss seeing my little bit of bling.   

DEATH TO WINDOWS! DEATH TO MICROSOFT! DEATH TO... ummm... hold on... rage subsiding... ok... gone the reason you stopped crashing is because your medals were png pic files, which is not exactly a common picture format. The problem is still on you local machine, and the problem is still Microsoft's fault. When in doubt, blame bill gates. Did i mention firefox 2.0 comes with a built in spell checker?

I agree wholeheartedly with the entire hate Microsoft thing. To paraphrase Marcathonas.

SPORKS IN THEIR EYES. DIE DIE DIE DIE TILL THEY DIE TO DEATH!!!!1

But seriously, you can't uninstall IE so I just go ahead and use it. It has turned out that this is a CPU performance issue. My home computer which is a 900 MHz Celeron does this a lot, my work computer has a 3.2 GHz Xeon and almost never does.

In any case, as soon as I finish my current game I'm going to buy a high performance PC and video card. I need to do this soon before the PC comes with Vista instead of XP. Don't get me started on Vista.   

Why not build your own? ... Don't know how?

I have to laugh here a bit, because I do know how to do this. I designed PC's for NEC between 1990 and 1994. I designed PC's ranging from a 286SX20 to a P54C90 (the second Pentium chip). I invented Local Bus Video that essentially became codified as Vesa VL Local Bus before it was usurped by PCI. Essentially, the concept behind Local Bus Video was the foundation of AGP.

From there I went to Digital Equipment Corp. and designed Alpha processor based workstations from 266 MHz to in excess of 1 GHz while Intel was still struggling to produce chips at 200 MHz. Since then I've designed boards based on multi GHz PowerPC processors, DSP's and god knows what else. I've designed network equipment ranging from Gigabit Ethernet to OC12 at 622 MHz to OC192 at 10 GHz.

Building a PC is trivial, you buy a motherboard, power supply, chassis, drives, etc. and put them together with a screwdriver. The first PC that I "built" this way was in 1996 and was based on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro processor with a 1 MB internal L2 cache. I paid $1000 for the processor alone. This PC had sufficient performance for all my needs until 2001 when the introduction of DirectX was essentially too much for it. At that point I was sick of trying to catch the latest performance craze and just I bought a 900 MHz Celeron for $300 after rebate. This included 512MB of 266Mhz DDR memory and a 20GB drive (which was large at the time). I couldn't have touched this price with a separate motherboard and individual components. I've since had to upgrade my video card for $50 and a 180GB drive for $89. The biggest issue today with buying components and slapping them together are the thermal concerns. Anyway, with rebates and the cost of systems today, "building" your own is just not worth the bother.

I do appreciate the offer, but I'm fully cognizant of the pros and cons of "building" my own PC and how to go about it.

Thanks, I truly did appreciate the laugh and you would have no way of knowing my background in PC's.