Under Tools, there should be a selection - Repair Browser. Try that first, it is the least painless. Was there anything that happened that started this behavior - added a new plugin or something similar?

yes. i wisited a **** site with a **** load of pop ups.

Do you have some kind of pop-up stopper installed on your machine? If so, you may have inadvertantly told it to exclude a site that you visit. These pop-up ads will sometimes use the similar url for a site and excluding it excludes the main site. For example, abc's news site will often bring up one of those "background" pop-ups that if excluded will also knockdown the news site itself.
 
On the other hand, some sites can install an icon on the explorer tool bar (or in the registry without an icon being visible), which you may have excluded with a pop-up stopper.

Plato
Last week I came accross this problem on a friends machine. I could not fix it so MS support got an email and within 24 hours they sent us a bug fix. I will get the reply that they sent tomorrow and post it here
Peter
wysiwug Austraila

thanx a mill!
 

Hello friends ,
The best possible solution is here . This error occurs when u visit a Java enabled web-site , if I am not wrong . So all you have to do is either un-install and re-install Java . Or download latest Java SDK 1.4 from java.sun.com ...
 
Pls reply me at adnantr@hotmail.com if this mesg is of any use to u . bye
 
Adnan

Folks,
 
Removing J2RE SE V1.4.2_05 helped solve this problem...
 
Thx Adnan!