Thanks for all the help and sorry for not getting back sooner as I was busy being made redundant from my job... :-(
Anyway, on to the problems, I am about to throw the laptop out the window. I have now tried everything listed in all the websites. I removed IE8, removed SP1 and done all the suggestions around proxy servers and so on. The only thing I am unable to do is re-install ie7. When I dounload the exe off msdn and try to run it I cannot as ie7 says it is not for vista.
As I said I am about to chuck this out a window and I think the only way around it is for ie7 to be removed and reinstalled but I cannot seem to do that in vista. If you have any final suggestions I will be most happy but otherwise dont spend too much time on it..
Thanks again for all the help :-)
Mark O'Reilly