Problems w/ Internet Explorer

[JimJRJ]

just intsalled Windows XP SP2 on my new hard drive and when I go on the Internet I'm having some problems. For instance when I go to google and want to do a search, I place my mourse cursor over the search field and click on it so I can type in what I want to search for. However I cannot click on that field or any other field with my mouse cursor to type things in the browser. Now I can use the mouse cursor and click on the URL address bar to type things in, but not with the browser itself. I ended up downloading the firefox browser and everything works fine. However I need to activate my Windows XP and when I try I click on the "next" button on the bottom of the activation screen to continue, it clicks but does not go forward. It seems like there is some IE browser problem on my computer and it is preventing me from activating Windows XP. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks!

[bombledmonk]

2 things come to mind.
Run AdawareSE and Spybot Search and Destroy.
Uninstall IE and then Reinstall it..?

[JimJRJ]

I'll give that a shot tonight with adaware and spybot. I wouldn't mind so much as I am using the firefox browser now, but for some reason it seems the Windows XP activation screen is linked to the IE browser.

Can you uninstall IE though? I thought that you couldn't uninstall IE if it came with your OS because it was so deeply rooted in the OS?

[johnnyis42]

i have tried and tried to do the repair/reinstall steps suggested on microsoft's site for internet explorer in windows XP, and personally i have never gotten it to work correctly. when i say i have tried and tried, i have gone so much as to change registry settings in order to make windows think that IE needed to finish installing, run the installer through the command line using varios administrative options, but it never worked for me. it may have somehting to do with the fact that usually when i had gotten to that point, whatever i had done to cause the problem (and it was usually completely my own fault i got there) i had torqued things so badly that there's no telling whether the reinstall not working was my fault or not.

on that note, i can no longer find the IE repair instructions on microsoft's site, so trying to re-install it through the controll panel might be a long shot. the spyware stuff is the most likely culperate anyhow.