I'd have thought this might have come up before but can't find anything so still struggling with the joys of Vista….

I have Vista Home Premium on my new Dell desktop, out of the box the installed IE7 didn’t work properly, occasional strange error messages such as “can’t find such and such a page” when I was in fact looking at the page. And never been able to save anything to favourites, I just get a message "unable to create ....unspecified error."

I have tried to use Dell support in the past and couldn’t really face that again so thought the best way out would be to use Mozilla Firefox. That worked just fine. Unfortunately it turned out that my Norton 360 is not fully compatible with Firefox, so back to IE7. I needed IE to work properly but no amount of searching for patches or updates was any help. I couldn’t find a Vista version download of IE7, only an XP version. Nothing else for it but to reinstall Vista.

Using the Dell labelled disk supplied with the computer the reinstall took about 90 minutes and made absolutely no difference to the problems with IE. Same problems as before the reinstall.

I also lost a lot of settings and will have to reinstall my scanner etc. But more annoyingly, for whatever reason I now have no audio anymore, audio properties show “no audio devices are installed.” My speakers are just little USB ones (which used to work). I’ve tried a different USB port and everything else I can think of but they are still invisible to Vista, could audio be turned off in some check box buried in some obscure screen? Any ideas where I should look?

I could really use some good ideas here, any thoughtson how to try to sort these two problems?

How to get IE7 working properly?

How to get my audio back?

Appreciate any help.