I don't know when it started happening... it might have been when I did one of the IE upgrades. Or maybe it was when I installed recent intellimouse drivers. Or maybe it was because of the phase of the moon or something, but...

For the last several months I've been sometimes clicking on a link in IE, and it seems like I really did click it (the link even changes color to indicate that it got the mousedown event), but it doesn't follow the link. IE just sits there as if I'd never clicked. When nothing happens after a few seconds, I look at the throbber to see if it's going, and it's not. It's as if it deliberately ignored my click.

When I click the second time, the throbber starts going and everything works.

This is very annoying, and it didn't used to happen to me. Does anyone know what causes it?

Note: I've had it happen on both 98 and Win2K, in both IE5 and IE6, on two computers with two different kinds of mice.