Where did my text go?

I saw a similar question, but the solution offered doesn't apply. I too have IE7 and Windows VistaSP1. While I'm composing whole gmail at mail.google.com/mail, my text goes poof. Most times it doesn't become saved as a draft. It just disappears leaving a new empty window for me
to start over. I've got other problems with gmail, one may be related to this. While composing
my curser freezes up and/or it just disappears. None of this happens while I compose with OpenOffice 2.4. There are no error codes.