[Carol RN]

Hello. Hope you can help me with my partially non-functioning MSIE.

I have a Dell Dimension 3000, one year old, running WinXP Pro version 2002, that came with SP2 already installed. Using Windows firewall and AVG.

For the past 6 months or so, my Internet Explorer will not open at all. When I click on the icon, the icon flickers and there is also a faint icon that appears in my taskbar which disappears instantly. I can get online via AOL 9.0 SE, and also through Firefox with no problems.

I cannot get automatic Windows updates because of this, but I've done all available updates manually, the last being 3 days ago. I cannot access any Windows help areas. Microsoft Money will not do automatic downloads, so I have to do those manually from my banking site. This is getting to be more hassle than I want to deal with.

Every site I've checked about repairing IE tells me to insert the installation disk, but I do NOT have the original installation disk. When I bought my computer Dell was not including them nor offering the option of buying them.

The other day a friend gave me an unopened XP Pro version 2002 disk that he retrieved from the trash when his company was upgrading their computers. Is it legal and ethical for me to use this disk? If so, would I be able to repair my IE with it? And, most important, how would I do that? XP is still a mystery to me in many ways.

Would it be better to download the new IE7 beta?

I'm sorry this was so long, but I wanted to include all the information I could. Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.

Carol

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Have you tried downloading and installing IE 6 sp1? You can get it at http://www.microsoft...&displaylang=en
What I think is unethical is for Dell to be selling computers WITHOUT providing a windows install cd, since you are in fact paying for that software when you buy the computer. If it were me, I would make Dell give me a licensed OEM windows xp install cd.

As far as that cd retrieved from the trash--I won't offer any opinion as to the legality or ethics of using that. You said it was unopened? It could be those that threw it away chose not to use it for some reason.

Edited by austin_o, 27 April 2006 - 07:10 AM.

[austin_o]

Have you tried downloading and installing IE 6 sp1? You can get it at http://www.microsoft...&displaylang=en
What I think is unethical is for Dell to be selling computers WITHOUT providing a windows install cd, since you are in fact paying for that software when you buy the computer. If it were me, I would make Dell give me a licensed OEM windows xp install cd.

As far as that cd retrieved from the trash--I won't offer any opinion as to the legality or ethics of using that. You said it was unopened? It could be those that threw it away chose not to use it for some reason.

Edited by austin_o, 27 April 2006 - 07:10 AM.

[Johanna]

http://www.helpwithw...P/howto-03.html



The Elder Geek

It's my site so now I get to tell you how I'd deal with this situation. Really, neither of the methods above that Microsoft recommends are bad, but my approach would be to first run the System File Checker from Method I, but stop short of doing any of the upgrade, repair, or reinstall options. If that didn't solve the problem, I'd go to Method II and reinstall IE6 and OE6. If that still didn't solve the problem I'd head back to Method I and do a complete reinstall of XP. It's still my contention that piling fixes and repairs onto a damaged operating system is just postponing the inevitable reformat.

http://www.theelderg...ie_and_oe_6.htm



You could more than likely use that cd to do a repair (or any similar cd you borrow) but DO NOT try to reformat with it. Because you have a Dell, you may have the necessary files already on your hard drive, maybe in another partition, (usually called recovery or something similar) so you could run the SFC and the IE repair by those by clicking bowse, and pointing to that location, if the files exist, when Windows prompts for the media.



Hope this helps,

Johanna