I'm having a strange issue with IE7 on Vista Business. My computer is fully patched and up to date. I use Firefox for all browsing except Windows Live Hotmail. Up until a week or so ago, IE7 worked fine with all sites and I had no issues. Now, when I try to load many Microsoft sites, the status bar shows all the content loading, but I end up with a completely blank page. This happens consistently on all of the following sites:

http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
www.hotmail.com - this redirects to a login.live.com/login.srf

I have yet to come across a non-microsoft site that will not load properly. However, the following sites will load fine with IE7:

http://login.live.com/login.srf - this is interesting, as the above version with the long string won't load
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
www.google.com
www.stuff.co.nz

I have the same issues when I access these sites through Firefox with the IE Tab extension (this uses IE7 for rendering sites within Firefox). I would like to be able to fix this issue, as IE7 is used to load Hotmail from within Messenger, and is the only browser I can use to access Windows Update.

Firefox works fine for all these sites, and I have never had these issues in the past.

I've googled a bit, and other people seem to have had this issue, but none of the suggestions work for me. Here's what I've done:

- Cleared all IE7 private data (cookies, browsing history)
- Reset IE7 to 'factory' defaults
- Tried starting IE7 with no add-ons
- Tried lowering my security and privacy settings, including adding microsoft.com, live.com and msn.com to the allowed sites list in IE7 privacy options

My theory (which is only partially informed) is that there is something specific to the above sites (a protocol or something?) that is getting flagged somewhere, disabling all the page content. I'm just not sure what is doing this blocking. Surely I can assume that Windows Firewall and Windows Defender wouldn't be blocking Microsoft's own sites?

I run AVG antivirus, and my latest thought is that perhaps something has changed that is now causing these issues. I'm at a loss as to how I can diagnose this though - can I turn AVG off?

Any help would be most appreciated - please refrain from suggesting "ditching IE and just sticking to Firefox" :) AFAIK it's not possible to 'reinstall' IE7.

Cheers,

Ash