I recently upgraded few things in my second machine and reloaded win xp and now things in internet explorer arent showing up. Like buttons in hotmail come up as red x's, or banners on some sites give me the "this page cannot be displayed" error or ad pages that load up before a site comes up wont display and such. Most of it is annoying stuff anyway, but its bugs me more to see error and page load errors allover hehe.

My game machine can load the same pages just fine. I compared the security settings and such on each and they are the same.

The machine has windows xp on it with SP2, all windows updates.

Any idea Ive been battling this a week and I am stuck, I ran out of ideas. Thanks.

Have you checked the HOSTS. file?
("C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\")

It needs only contain

"
127.0.0.1 localhost
"

Holy poop that fixed it.

It was filled with stuff from sex sites and popup adds and junk, like atleast 300 or more command lines of that junk so I moved the whole file out of the directoy to my desktop and voila IE is picking up stuff just like it should.

Thanks for the help Id never have figured it out on my own.

It doesn't always fix things, but you may want to make the hosts file read only. You should be able to right click the file and hit properties. Then under attributes, check the box next to read only. Or you can go through the command prompt and type in:

attrib +r hosts.

Of course, you have to migrate over to the directory(folder) where this file exists.