IE won't display pages

[Cillies]

Hi all, I have this problem with Internet Explorer, where when I do a search sometimes the results will come up and other times I get a message page saying that the page cannot be displayed. Now when I do get the results of the search and I click on a link, again sometimes the required page will come up and other times it won't, if I keep opening and closing the page it will eventually display the page. I.e. I am only trying to open hotmail or
something like that. Plus refresh doesn't work, and pages only sometimes display whether or not they are the result of a search, or the address has been typed into the location/address bar.

I have recently installed a seagate hard drive as my master drive and reinstalled windows XP home, then the service packs, 1+2.

Hope some one can help as to why IE is behaving in such a way.

p.s.
I have scanned with AVG, ad-aware, syp-bot. and still no change in IE performance

 

[bankboysb]

The problem is very likely SP2. Have you been reading up on the many problems of SP2? Even Microsoft had to withdraw it from circulation for a while. Check out the poll results below...

http://isc.sans.org/xpsp2.php

--no opinion-- 4%
no problems 44%
small problems 26%
big problems, but solvable 8%
big problems, could not use/install 9%
had to rebuild system 9%

If you do a web search you will be able to find many instances of browser problems related to the SP2.

Your problem is likely a malfunctioning firewall. I don't think you can turn off the firewall after SP2 is installed, so your only option is to roll back the system to pre-SP2 using the system restore. Check on the web for further details. Good luck! You might consider reinstalling Windows.