imp and logging in

[Network]

On the lan I am having problems logging in with imp using ie5.5 in the
following manor;

The entire site is SSL enabled...
After user name and password are entered and <login button> or <enter> is
pressed, I am presented with a dialog that informs me "This contains
'secure' and non-secure items, Do I want to display the non-secure items?"
At this point no matter which button I press I am given a "The page cannot
be displayed" (further down this page it has a link to detect Network
settings).

This process has to be repeated numerous times before it snaps out of
whatever loop its in and allows users to login.  This also happens after a
user has successfully logged in and is composing a mail; in order to send
that mail the user has to hit the "send button" a minimum of 2/3 times...
sometimes even loosing the composed mail to the same page described above
(The page cannot be displayed) having to re-type the entire msg because the
window has no <back button>.  This only happens with IMP pages.

I chose the IMP-2.2.4 because it is listed as *Stable*
IMP-2.2.4 is running on the following hardware
cpu= P-II/400
Ram= 128

Software ....
OS/FreeBSD-4.2-Stable
PHP Version 4.0.4pl1
IMAP-uw c-Client Version 4.1
Mysql= Client API version 3.23.32
Apache Version Apache/1.3.17
mod_ssl/2.8.0 OpenSSL/0.9.6

Before sending this mail off I tried once again to login and go over the
notes herein.  The results below......
Closed the browser completely
reopened browser
accepted sites certificate
logged in to SSL site
browsed to horde/imp/index.php3
typed in uid and password
login failed as stated above. <-- I tried this 7 times using the <enter> and
the <login button> it failed each time until I reloaded the
horde/imp/index.php3 via the browser button then re-entered the uid and
password again.  This time it worked.  Thru this entire ordeal, we were
monitoring all apache logs as well as /var/log/messages... not on error is
to be found will the logins were failing.

During successful logins we do get the following;
Feb  5 22:13:37 tester IMP[41439]: Login 192.168.0.3 to localhost:143 as
tower
Feb  5 22:13:37 tester imapd[42012]: Login failure user=
host=localhost.swahilie.net [127.0.0.1]
Feb  5 22:13:43 tester last message repeated 2 times

I have no idea where to look in order to fix that.