I'm Stumped

So the laptop is working - mostly. Strange thing happening with IE. It won't open links when I click on them. What up with that? Tried downloading most recent version, but still have a problem. Guess it's time to delve into the annals of user forums to see if there is some solution. Or maybe it's because I tried turning on the built-in firewall within XP instead of using ZoneAlarm which was causing my system to take forever to boot? This system was supposedly cleaned up (yeah - they totally removed my music downloading software!) so I really didn't expect to be having a problem like this. And of course all my bookmarks (er, favorites) are in IE since I started using it almost exclusively since I couldn't load Google toolbar into Netscape which actually is my preferred browser.

I really shoulda never let go of my Mac .....

UPDATE: Problem solved thanks to Annoyances.org.