For what it's worth, I don't use IE8 here, and I was going to experiment for a few more days before reporting this problem. But have had problems connecting to perlmonks.org for quite some time. It turns out that there are 3 unique IP addresses served out by the DNS servers for perlmonks.org. When I hard code my local machines to only use 66.39.54.27 for perlmonks.org, all the problems go away and the speed is quite acceptable. I haven't yet gone back to see which of the other two machines is causing the problem.

It would be very informative if you found that solved the problem for you too.