I was at some ones house and they have dialup with Windows XP all updates
installed we can surf with Netscape and if you open windows Explorer and
type in a url in the address bar you can view the web page but if you try IE
you just get can not find server page. In fact popups from pages viewed in
windows explorer die as well.

It is odd that one would work and the other not as they are all part of
Windows. IE is such a part of XP you can not uninstall it any more. I did
find a MS article about how to change the registry to make windows update
think that you do not have the latest version of IE or to run system file
checker. But they have dialup who wants to wait around for that.

Any ideas before I try the IE update.

They called Sony and got the old use the restore cd.