Something went wrong and we can’t sign you in at the moment.

I am trying to get to my Outlook.com account, but after I enter "outlook.com" into IE's address bar it starts an extended sequence of switching between URLs login.live.com and about:blank  until after several iterations I finally get the dreaded message "Something went wrong and we can't sign you in at the moment.". This seems to happen regularly on my PC, though never happens from my Surface RT. I can restart the machine, reset my browser, but nothing works. After several days sometime I can get in alright, but then suddenly it blocks again. I would be grateful for some explanation of why this happen, or where to look for things that might be incorrectly set up. I've searched all over the web, without luck. It's not like I'm a newb - I'm an IT pro and have been using email for decades, but I've never experienced anything like the continual frustration of having a Microsoft/live/outlook account.