Between my last post and this morning, a patch has appeared on Windows Update for the very IE8 problem I described.

The KB article suggests that it occurs as a result of a recovery timeout which is too aggressive if you have a low-spec machine, or it is under high load.

That may well be the case, but starting up IE from cold on this Core2 Extreme (Quad core) box  (depending on the page you have set as home) qualifies, so there is clearly a perf problem elsewhere (as per the slashdot.org sluggishness), as well as the over-sensitive timeout.

That said, this is a very minor niggle about an otherwise excellent release candidate (anyone remember Win2k RC? *shudder*)