My techie thoughts on these issues
Ok for the loading times, if you are not killing your internet bandwidth for the modem, and as you say they are both identical machines it sounds like you might have a spyware/malware issue on that computer. I would recommend trying to run, Adaware, spybot, and a free online virus scan, you can use this help site for this if you want the links. www.mountaincable.net/help
see if that helps at all. Firefox is fast last time I checked except when it came to first loading it, and you can get some plugins to improve functionality. I personally don't use IE anymore becasue it leads to my comp getting infected with lots of stuff. I use adblock with firefox so I also don't see alot of ads on sites anymore which also decreases load times and spyware.
As for the bluescreens of death issue, what version of windows are you running? it sounds odd, I haven't seen one of those in years and I try and run my comps into the ground with what I do...
Hopes this helps ;)