I had IE7 installed to begin with but the one I downloaded was a new build from what I understand. But anyway it works and thats all that matters. It may have been something had gotten corrupted in the original version and the reinstall just corrected it.

Well I got it to work finally. I downloaded the new IE7 installer which I read somewhere is actually an update for XP and installed it then did the windows updates and it all still works so if someone else has ran into this problem my suggestion is to update IE7 first then do the windows updates it worked for me. Didn't have to start over after all yea. 

I'm just going to reinstall XP from scratch and start over it was about time to do it anyway. Seems I end up doing it every 6-9 months anyway. I was reading in the Windows Secrets newsletter that one of the updates was conflicting with certain security software and was shutting down IE from connecting to the internet but forget which one it was. Anyway thanks for your help.

Well it's not the winsock. I checked it and it didn't seem to be corrupt but went ahead and ran the repair anyway and the problem is still there. I have restored a backup image of the drive anad that fixed it until the updates installed then it went back to not connecting. I tried doing a restore to before the updates that was successful but it didn't undo the problem. I have discovered it is affecting a few more apps, namely Internet Download Mng, and the Yahoo toolbar in Firefox. The toolbar doesn't load the buttons it just is blank. In the download manager it won't connect to any download, but I can bypass the manager and download through Firefox.

 For some reason IE will not connect to any sites. It says I'm not connected to the internet but I am as Firefox opens sites with no problems. IE for some reason isn't recognizing the network connection. As far as I can tell everything else that connects to the internet is working fine it seems to be just IE. I had IE7 installed and thought it might be that so uninstalled it but IE6 is doing the same thing. I even tried to install MSN Explorer but the installer for that didn't detect the connection either. I'm out of ideas on what it can be.

 I did finally try running them in the cmd program first and they work that way. I was just double clicking on them before. I had run into this problem before but didn't remember how I got them to work until after I posted this ?. Thanks for the help.

The program I'm trying to run is VBoxmanager.exe which is part of virtualbox, but this happens with any program that is designed to run from the command line. Some others are some of the Sysinternal programs, Clockres.exe, handle.exe, ntfsinfo.exe etc.

 If I try to run a command line utility it briefly flashes on the screen then closes. How do I get them to stay open?

Well I fixed it. I just did a restore too a couple of days ago and it's working again. I had forgotten about trying to do a system restore since most of the time when I have tried one it would fail in the past. It worked this time though so problem solved. 

 The shortcut to IE on the desktop won't open IE now. When you click on it another icon is put on the desktop instead of opening IE. I tried a reg fix from Kelly's Korner but that didn't fix it. I don't know how it got changed but it was working right yesterday.