A client of mine purchased a Windows Vista PC about 4 months ago. About a month ago, he started experiencing a problem where Internet Explorer would not load pages. Here is what happens: He has about 50 shortcuts to websites saved on his desktop. After turning on the computer, these shortcuts work as expected (you click one, that site opens in IE). However, after some time (he says about an hour) clicking the shortcuts will open IE, and in the status bar IE displays "Connecting to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" (where xxx is the IP address of the website), but sits there loading forever. The page is never displayed. If instead, he opens IE from a shortcut to IE (not to a specific site) the homepage loads fine. He can then type in the address to any of the sites and those sites load fine. If he restarts the computer, the shortcuts will once again work as expected for some time. I've checked the hosts file, cleared the DNS cache, etc. just to be sure, but since the websites load fine when typed in manually, I don't think it is a network problem. I also tried resetting the IE settings to defaults, and even reinstalling IE, but this problem still occurs. What would make the shortcuts to URLs fail to load, but not affect manually navigating to those same sites? PS: Using Vista HP with IE 8. Cable internet shared with a router. No software firewall active. -Ryan Adams Free Computer Tips and more:http://RyanTAdams.com Paid Tech Support: Black Diamond