Gary, I have been using IE 5.2.2 since it was first released without major problems. Sometimes (rarely) a frozen page required me to quit IE and then relaunch it, but on the whole it worked fine; though I am now migrating to Safari.
But to the issue (my best shot), when you reinstalled IE, did you trash all of the residuals? I suggest saving, in as separate location, (only) the User/Preferences/Explorer folder as it contains the Favorites. Do a search on Explorer and trash everything else. Then reinstall IE. If that goes OK, replace the new Explorer folder with the one you saved.
Harv