He's not alone in experiencing that issue, and I think it's definitely related to IE. I've had it happen to me in both Win XP and Win 7. Animated gifs will boot me out of a thread and also reset my forum color setting from Light to Dark.
Blame the codex! Hehe. What browser (and version) do you have?The latest post in this thread is an example of an animated gif that crashes the page for me.
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12045&page=24
post #467
post. - What browser do you use?