Computer Issues (Downloading and Internet Explorer)?

[oInstanc]

I believe you're asking a few things, but I think the first debugging step is the same for all of them. Let's reset your options.

If your menu bar doesn't show up, right-click on the top of the window next to the open tab or just below it, and click "Menu Bar." If that doesn't work, hit the Alt key to pop it down. Once you have your menus, go to Tools, then at the bottom Internet Options.

Once you're in the Internet Options dialog, go to the right-hand pane "Advanced" and at the bottom there are two Reset buttons. When you do 'Restore Advanced Settings' it will revert all the checkboxes on that pane back to their defaults, which is a good thing.

When you click "Reset...", a second window pops up. Check the "Delete personal settings" checkbox and hit Reset. This should solve problems with addons and third party code in Internet Explorer.

Finally, go to the Programs tab, click Manage Addons, and for the first screen "Toolbars and Extensions" highlight everything and click "Disable All" on the bottom right. This will make it so we can be totally confident third party code isn't running from within IE (though they could still be manipulating things from an external executable, such a thing is very rare).

Your browser will still execute javascript and do the things it needs to do with everything disabled unless you use very specialized sites with lots of custom programming. I doubt you'll use such sites unless you're on a corporate network.

Try those, see how things pan out, and let me know if we need to dig further?