> It's a work provided laptop.

Then have work fix it.

Or if it's possible and company policy doesn't prevent it, have another
valid user log onto the machine and see if IE6 works for them.

> but in general I don't mess with the machine much

Famous last words. Heh.

> WRT trying IE7 (which someone else suggested) ... we have some
> specialized document handling software that's tied to IE6 and Office
> 2K. IT won't yet guarantee it to work with newer versions.

Won't guarantee doesn't mean won't work. But given your restricted
privileges on the machine it would probably be a bad idea to go monkeying
with the IE6/IE7 overlap issues.

I'm guessing the profile for your account has gotten screwy. I've seen it
happen on machines of my own. I've had to go so far as to trash that user
profile and start all over. IE just got unfixably confused about how to
deal with connections. Granted, this was on a machine that was several
years old and had been through a number of network card changes and VPN
setups. There's a series of layers that IE depends upon to figure out how
to "connect". It shouldn't be that complicated, but there it is. Proxies,
routing, vpn, dial-up, domain membership, etc. It's all tied together
behind the scenes. When it works it's great, but when it gets screwed up
it's a royal PITA to untangle.

Try having a cow-orker log onto the box and use IE6 for something that is
known to fail for you. If their session works, well, you've got a profile
problem. You might want to wander into Microsoft's technet articles to see
if they discuss this and suggest fixes. This might be worthwhile as work's
approach might be to just nuke your profile and force you to start over.
This will upset any other apps or configurations you've got set up. But it
may, in the end, deleting and recreating the profile may be the only
solution.

-Bill Kearney