Magento - ie8 issue and speed issue

I am having issues with IE8 and the Magento site hanging. It takes about 10 seconds to load a page and the navigation does not work in this time. I need this issue fixed so it loads the same as google chrome and Firefox. Also, the left navigation has been written into a phtml design file. I need a module created for each in the left side bar so it only calls the function for each individual section. Also, clean up some js code. ie. $.noConflict();