Hi there,
As reghakr said above, it could be that another program is the default viewer for jpegs or gifs.
Do you have any programs such as paint shop pro etc? and if so, I would just reset the file associations for gifs and jpegs. Open up my computer, then go to 'View', 'folder option', 'file types' and scroll down to the jpegs and gifs and click on edit. Make sure that the path points to iexplore.exe ("C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\iexplore.exe" -nohome).
Or after checking the file associations, if there is another progam taking over the jpegs and gifs, you could just uninstall this program, try internet explorer, reinstall the program but when doing so, say no if it asks to be the default program to display the images.
This should fix that problem.
Hope that this may help.
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