IE won't open Hotmail site sporadically

Question

I have a user at a client site running Windows 7 Pro who is having a problem in IE. About 1/3 of the time when she goes to the Hotmail website, IE 9 won't load the site but displays a blank window except for a message about not being able to load
the page.
She says this happens every day, however it mostly does it after she has visited other websites first and then tries to open the Hotmail site. If she opens her browser and immediately goes to Hotmail, then it opens fine (or maybe rarely errors out, I don't
recall if she said that or not).
She has never had this happen with any other website and she can go to any other computer in her office and browse other sites and then go to Hotmail and it opens every time. So there is something on her computer that is doing this. I tried running ipconfig
/flushdns, emptying her browser cache, and setting IE to empty the cache when exiting. I checked her network settings and they're all good. I even checked her hosts file and there's nothing in it to cause this.
As I said, if she goes to Hotmail first when opening IE it always opens and more times than not she can visit other sites first and still open Hotmail. But at least 1/3 of the time Hotmail won't open if she visits other sites first.
Anyone have any ideas of what else to do? I don't see how any settings in IE could do this since surely a misconfiguration or a wrong security setting would cause Hotmail to not load -all- of the time, not just some times.
Jonathan

Answer 1

Google.ca
Is that one predictable or frequent enough that it is annoying enough to try the tests that I mentioned?   Then FWIW I would start by seeing if the following procedure would change the frequency of the problem.   In a cmd window enter:
ipconfig  /flushdns
ping -n 1  -w 1  -4  google.ca
ipconfig  /displaydns
E.g. the main idea is the ping -4  to see if avoiding IPv6  and caching an IPv4 lookup for IE to use changes your symptom.   FWIW in my case, according to the Time To Live value, I would have about 3 minutes to use that.  
If that helped you could make it a cmd file.  ;  )
However, notice that there is an immediate redirect to 
www.google.ca  where you would face potentially the same lookup issues, so you might want to just request that directly or change your ping procedure accordingly.
I put it down to being a glitch in the software that will be fixed at some point.
Don't hold your breath.   This symptom and its inadequate diagnostics have been present in IE for as long as I can remember (IE4 in NT4.)   Exacerbating it now is the proliferation of caching servers (for more aliases and more redirects)
and now in W8 evidence of increasing attempts at using IPv6.  I don't even know if my router let alone my ISP supports IPv6.   ;  }
HTH
Robert
I connected to the user's PC just now and tried running the commands you specified. The only change I made was in the ping. I ran the ping agains 4 or 5 websites before running ipconfig /displaydns. Hotmail.com along with a couple of other sites I visited
did not reply to a ping. But in the /displaydns they did "answer". Google.com showed the shortest TTL. Hotmail.com was quite a bit longer but not the longest of the sites I tried.
The thing is, today I could not reproduce the problem. I tried visiting several websites and then going to hotmail.com and it opened right up. I ran the set twice and hotmail opened both times. This does jive with what the user has said that it doesn't happen
all the time. She said it happened 2 or 3 times to her this morning (I don't know why she doesn't connect leave hotmail open). So I'm going to try again tomorrow. I told her in the meantime if it happens, to leave all IE windows as they are and call me if
she can.
Jonathan