Have chased a big chunk of the problem to ESET NOD Antivirus.  Seems it and IE don't get along too well these days.  Eventually triggered one of the reports back from Microsoft stating "NOD Antivirus has problems with some Active-X controls.  ESET has been notified and is working on the problem".

A few other people have commented about NOD AV doing strange things.  For Iglohigh, it notified him Bryce 6 was creating a trojan when he saved his file.

Fixes could be a long time coming.

Brett