Well, so the weird thing is that I have tested with multiple versions of IE 6 and have not run into anything. I can't find what patches get me to the version that you have, so I can't reproduce that.
Traffic to the site has dropped off to 1/6th of what it was last month. Not quite sure why. I can't figure out anything in the logs - IE6 and IE7 are still generating the most hits -- if it was a multitude of people visiting in IE6 and locking up, I'd expect that to be the problem, but it's not.
So I really have no clue.
Really, the only difference between this new theme and the old, old one is the background color. So I have no idea why you're having so many problems. I also don't know why it would work if you come in from the front page and not if you directly request the URL.