Operation aborted - IE cannot open the internet site?

It was quite interesting  last week when a friend of mine told me that he could not visit my blog because he kept on getting this message: "......Operation aborted" each time when trying to open this blog's url address. At first he thought his computer had a problem, but he kept on getting the same message when he tried to use three different computers (home, library, school). Finally he sent me a message.

As usual, I started hunting for an answer from the internet. I quickly learned that, the problem could originate from the site user or site owner.

• The user would get the 'operation aborted' message if using some browser versions of Internet Explorer (IE) older than IE8 particularly the IE7. 
• The site owner would compound to the problem if they had installed a hit & visitor's counter from Sitemeter (now resolved from the user end).

I immediately email back my friend advising him to update his IE to the latest version and if possible, to stop using IE and start using Firefox and Google Chrome. I prefer Google Chrome for it's ability to load faster and use a small computer memory (only that it can't open some secure pages of some websites but that's fine, FireFox does that job for me).

Since my computer has IE8, it was impossible to experience the real frustration of 'operation aborted' so I asked my friend to not uninstall IE that reported the problem until I could find the solution to it and that, if I fail I'd give up and let him know; to which he agreed and kept sending a feedback.

• I started cleaning my template's html. That did not seem to solve the problem.
• Then I embarked on uninstalling one widget after another hoping that in the process of doing so, the problem will be gone, but it didn't.I only ended up loosing some useful widgets which, eh, the blog could survive without anyway.

But, wait, the site was loading just fine the day before, with all the widgets installed, up and running - so this could have not caused the problem.

• I then thought it could be related to some posts published that day. So, I went ahead and deleted all the posts on that particular day. This was my final attempt to solve the problem as I had started to create a new template for my blog... in the middle of doing so, I received a message from my friend saying that the problem had resolved. It was a sigh of relief. Anyway, I continued with my new project of creating a new template and finally the following day I got rid of my older version and installed the newest one.

Well, it's yet another chapter in my life of blogging : good and bad moments! - expect both.