IE11 stuck at initial start page for webdriver server only when connection to the URL is slow
Use remote driver with desired cap (pageLoadStrategy)
Release notes from seleniumhq.org. Note that we have to use version 2.46 for the jar, iedriverserver.exe and python client driver in order to have things work correctly. It is unclear why 2.45 does not work given the release notes below.
v2.45.0.2

Updates to JavaScript automation atoms.
Added pageLoadStrategy to IE driver. Setting a capability named 
pageLoadStrategy when creating a session with the IE driver will now change
the wait behavior when navigating to a new page. The valid values are:
"normal" - Waits for document.readyState to be 'complete'. This is the
            default, and is the same behavior as all previous versions of
            the IE driver.
"eager"  - Will abort the wait when document.readyState is
            'interactive' instead of waiting for 'complete'.
"none"   - Will abort the wait immediately, without waiting for any of
            the page to load.

Setting the capability to an invalid value will result in use of the
   "normal" page load strategy.
For the IE webdriver, it opens the IE browsers but it starts to load the local host and then stops (ie/ It never stated loading ). WHen the browser stops loading it shows the msg 'Initial start page for webdriver server'. The problem is that this does not occur every time I execute the test case making it difficult to identify what could be the cause of the issue. What I have noticed is when this issue occurs, the url will take ~25 secs to load manually on the same machine. When the issue does not occur, the URL will load within 3secs.
All security setting are the same (protected Mode enabled across all zone)
enhance protected mode is disabled
IE version 11
the URL is added as a trusted site.
Any clue why it does not load the URL sometimes?