I see that 3Dillusions had "Some Good News and Some Bad News",

For anyone else that has this problem Skype is the culprit.

I have Skype (but not FireFox) -- so I'm not seeing the effect you mentioned.  In addition, it doesn't seem to have that refresh problem on Internet Exploiter. 

I find that the Skype plugin to be very handy for starting Skype calls ... of course that's not enough to get me to switch from Netscape to IE.  LOL

--
Martin