Posted 06 August 2009 - 11:59 PM
Hi again! Frankp316, yes, I had SP3 installed and in place the first time I tried to upgrade to IE8, but I still experienced no internet ("Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage). After reading the advice to uninstall it and then to try IE7, I removed it. I installed IE7 without SP3, but it did not make a difference. I then re-installed SP3 to see if IE7 would run, but the result was exactly the same (no internet). The scary thing was, when I went to Control Panel and tried to uninstall IE7 to go back to IE6, this time it would not let me! I was worried that I had finally boxed myself out and would not be able to access the internet again. I had to uninstall SP3 all over again, restart, and then I was able to uninstall IE7. Very strange!
Mysterysgames, thank you for replying as well! Indeed, I had previously checked my firewall settings (I should have included that in my first post of all the things I tried). My firewall was just the Windows firewall and it was turned off. Additionally, I had read that sometimes anti-virus software stopped the upgrade so I made sure that the ones I had on my system were disabled (Ad-Aware and Super Anti-Sypyware). I had also read that add-ons could be a problem, so I made sure that they were all disabled at start-up as well. I even tried to open IE7 without add-ons just in case, but as soon as I tried to access a webpage, I got the same error message. Lastly, someone suggested going to Tools > Internet Options > Connections > Lan Settings and making sure that the box "Automatically detect settings" was checked. Well, I tried it with that box checked and unchecked but I still had no connectivity.
I did try microsoft support; I looked at several of their pages on problems with IE7 and IE8, but none of them addressed the problem I have. The closest one described how to recover from Winsock2 corruption (which inexplicably seems to occur only when I attempt to upgrade).
With regard to Firefox, I had downloaded it once, but rarely used it. When I had problems with the first upgrade, I tried to access the internet with Firefox but got a similar error message: Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at en-us www.mozilla.com." I uninstalled Firefox and downloaded it again, just to make sure I had the latest version, but still no connectivity. I have no idea how to get Firefox to work, however, one problem at a time!
I am still hoping someone can figure out why I cannot upgrade IE. All suggestions welcome!