Thanks Dave,
If I purge this winsock thing and restart I can log into my home page in Internet Explorer from the Desktop. I can log into anything using the Internet Explorer "app" on the opening screen.
From some sites I've visited looking for answers this appears to be quite a wide spread problem and affects other broswers as well which makes me think it's an OS problem?
OK, XP was buggy but, it mostly worked....why change it? oh, I forgot, $$$$$