most confusing issue i've had in awhile. I work at a company where we've placed several help desk calls for the same issue within the past week. we are running windows xp and ie6.0 - the back and forward buttons in IE have disappeared. I've gone into the toolbars and added the buttons back onto the bar but they are greyed out. This is only happening with the backwards and forwards buttons. we have multiple employees working on this issue but cannot come up with a resolution. This isnt happening to all users just randomly popping up at different sites we support. please assist!! thanks in advance!!

Moderator Edit: Moved topic to more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

Since it's occurring over the different sites that you support, then I'd guess that it was something that each site has in common. Perhaps a registry edit or a Group Policy setting?

Try reinstalling SP2 on the systems to see if it clears up the issue. Or, try installing IE7 to see if that fixes it (you can uninstall it and revert back to IE6 fairly easily).

we could try reinstalling sp2 on the particular machines..but what could cause such an odd happening? and how can we prevent it from continuing to happen to other machines? these questions continue to haunt me.

we did try installing IE7 but the buttons were greyed out and we reverted back to 6.0(due to some of our web based apps don't seem to like 7.0) ..any other suggestions appreciated. thanks in advance!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823057/en-us

-heres the fix for anyone who may come about this issue. thanks for the help BC.