Strange safari issue

mbp
lion
safari 5.1.1

Hello forum members

I'm seeking assistance with an issue I have recently starting experiencing with safari.

When I first start safari it just sits there, doesn't do anything. It will continue to sit there for about two minutes then will decide to pull my home page. There doesn't appear to be any network activity from safari whilst it's in a 'frozen' state (I'm using little snitch to confirm this). After a couple of minutes it will spring to life and work as normal (I then see network activity for safari), for a limited time. After a seemingly random period it will again fail to pull web pages. Whilst it's in this state I can select links on a webpage and the address bar changes to reflect this but again, no activity in little snitch.

I don't believe this is a network issue as firefox continues to work splendidly throughout.

Things i've tried thus far:

Believing it was a DNS issue i've disabled DNS prefetching following:
defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false

i've also tried resetting safari:
safari>reset safari

but with no joy, does anybody have any ideas? As i'm new to the mac world and i'm finding this difficult to resolve!

You may want to clear the browser cached data. I am not at my Mac at the moment and am not sure where that setting is. You can also use a program like Onyx to clear the caches as well.