I am using AOL 8.0 and IE 6 SP1 and have a dial-up connection. After I installed Symantecs Firewall 2004 I was unable to connect to the internet using AOL or IE. I then uninstalled the firewall and was able to connect to AOL but not IE (page not found). My aol is running but very slow and is only partially loading pages if I hit refresh 2 or 3 times it may load the page. Any suggestions?

First of all, try getting rid of AOL!!! Seriously, I don't know why people are so attached to the AOL interface to access the internet. There are so many ISP's apart from AOL that are more reliable and have less software overhead needed for internet browsing, email and chatting. Try this, sign-up for 30 days of service from one of these $9.99 / month providers with no contracts or obligations and see the difference. If you decide to cancel AOL, the biggest downside is you'll have is to inform all your friends and colleagues of your new email address (because you will loose access to any @aol.com address you have) but the reward will be worth the slight inconvenience. Besides, with Microsoft soon offering FREE 250MB Hotmail mailboxes, you should be using web-based email for most common communications anyway. That way, you can switch countries if you want and you won't have to worry about your updating people in your address book because of potential new ISP addresses. The only other thing I can suggest in your current configuration, is to verify that the programs you are having problems with have permission to access the internet through the firewall. For my money, you might also want to try switching to Zone Alarm's new Security Suite 5. It contains their very successful firewall as well as an antivirus engine, pop-up blocking, web-content filtering, and a few other features and benefits at the small cost of only about 10MB of disk space and very little system drag. Good luck, hope this helps. ~ Fuzzy

I uninstalled the firewall so there shouldn't be a problem with permissions? Should I try re-installing IE? If so, is there a site that I can download the complete program and then copy it to disk and use the disk to install it on another PC?

I can say this with a good deal of certainty, AOL and firewalls don't play very well together. So I wasn't being flip about my suggestion of getting rid of AOL, it was quite sincere. AOL should have gone away like Rubix cubes and ISA slots long ago! Well, first of all, all PC's (Windows-based) have IE on them already. So you shouldn't have to download IE and install in on another PC for it should already be there. I am not that familiar with the workings of AOL's software. You could try uninstalling AOL's software and reinstalling it. From what I understand, AOL's interface both dials the connection for you and provides you with a proprietary version of IE. So possibly doind a fresh install of AOL 8 will get you to a good point again. One final suggestion, you might want to call AOL's or Symantec's tech support. Either one, more likely Symantec should be able to troubleshoot the problem within a few minutes.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Hi people! My internet explorer isnt working, am using mcafee personal firewall 2004. Might that be the problem. I had to use netscape 7.1 to do this. Well the problem is that when i open my internet explorer, the page keeps loading and loading, loading but nothing comes out! It keeps blanc and nothing happens. If someone could help me do it fast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!