I have a laptop with WinXP professional and IE8 installed,

Recently I have been having a problem that while I can get on to the web and log on to some pages, some (all?) embedded links don't work and a number of web pages are just returned as a blank page - no error message.

Have I inadvertently changed one of the IE8 settings or perhaps have a virus?

I have reset IE8 to it's default settings but no luck

This first happened when I was updating my anti virus software (which failed!)

Would appreciate your advice - thank you