Problems with Graphics

I'm having some really annoying problems lately with graphics loading on my computer when web-browsing. A lot of the time, if I'm using Internet Explorer, suddenly graphics will stop loading entirely. Thus, suddenly this blog will appear plain white with dark text; other sites with graphics will only load in text only versions, et cetera.

I started getting around this by browsing the Web through AOL, but even there all is not perfect. What happens there is that graphics load mostly, but not all the way. I've got the backgrounds and masthead for this blog, for instance, but the Wonder Woman image in this post isn't loading all the way (it looks fuzzy), as are the background images on John Scalzi's Blog Number One and the sidebar graphics on the FilmScoreMonthly site, to name just two examples.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what on Earth is going on with my computer?

UPDATE: OK, can anyone confirm whether the afore-mentioned Wonder Woman picture is showing up properly, on any browser?

In comments, the suggestion is made that I scotch IE and switch to Mozilla. I suppose I may give this a try -- it can't hurt, and I can always uninstall the thing if it bugs me -- but I'm still confused as to why all of these graphics-rendering problems would have cropped up in just the last week or so. And it's selectively problematic, too: I can be surfing along, happy as a rat in liverwurst, and then suddenly BAM! there go the graphics. Is there a possibility that some weird bit of adware or viral activity has somehow corrupted the way IE works on my machine? (I use both Ad-Aware 6.0 and McAfee virus software, and both are up-to-date.) And if so, is Mozilla more resistant to that kind of thing?