As for the rest, if that’s something that’s being done deliberately I can see MS getting into a fair amount of trouble for it.

Okay, so you know me well enough to know this, but it is this kind of silly “*?$ that I get annoyed with whenever I have to use Windows.

And I’ve just noticed (in supurb ironical fashion) that seeing as I can’t get to the internet via IE…..WINDOWS UPDATE WON’T RUN…. so yeah, it looks like a critical windows update might be preventing me from continuing to update…. I’d laugh if I weren’t so annoyed.

You might be able to do something clever on the firewall/router? Catch the outbound requests and perform mangleing on them and send them to a server you can talk to, your ISP is probably running one.

It’s a bodge, but if any of the later updates fix this…

Anyway, I uninstalled SP2 in the hope that would help but it hasn’t so I’m really not sure what’s going on.

I may have to start throwing things soon….

grumbles

I actually had no idea Outlook Express was ever in Add/Remove… and the fact that it isn’t now doesn’t surprise me at all. If you are really that zealous about getting rid of it, then just delete the shortcut and it’s folder in Program Files.

Unfortunately I have no useful suggestions to solve the other problems beyond FFR, but hey, who said comments were supposed to be useful. Just my 2c that I felt the need to add, given how everyone is hating on SP2 and I’ve had no bad experiences yet.

I was kinda hoping to avoid that, but the more dead end solutions I follow the more likely it’s looking…

Run a full backup with Norton Ghost onto a separate partition of my harddrive
Format C:
Reinstall Windows
Reinstall Norton
Reinstate Ghost Backup
Change network cables
Download and install IE6+SP1

And now it all appears to be working again…*touch wood*