LinkedIn is an online professional-networking tool. For my money, it's the only one worthy of the name. Check out my public profile if you're curious... the free membership is useful, and the $20 monthly subscription is really useful.

Anyway, probably the coolest application of LinkedIn is in job-hunting, because it enables you to bypass the HR swamp and communicate directly with decision-makers in your target organization. To capitalize on this, LinkedIn offers a great browser toolbar that checks any job listing you examine at Craig's List, Monster.com, and other job sites, and displays a list of LinkedIn members in your network affiliated with the company in question.

Cool, right?

Except that recently I've noticed some odd behavior in my browser. When I'm working in Gmail, Google Calendar, and other Google apps, operations that cause a pop-up window to open often cause my browser to crash. Bad news.

I know that most such problems in IE7 can be traced back to third-party add-ins, so I started disabling them one by one, and—sure enough—the culprit turned out to be LinkedIn's toolbar. So I've turned it off, and my problem has gone away.

Here's hoping they fix it soon.