it is probably one of the many ads that are on these pages that are triggering that cpu spike with IE 6 something in IE is not working properly with the ad. I was having major problems here also due to the ads and had to break down and put ad block plus on my firefox just to get this site to work right. It is very very ad heavy to say the least.

Clear the History and then close IE. When you reopen IE does your concern still occur? DA

I also wonder do you have a firewall and have you tried dropping your firewall and trying to get your pc to connect, it could be something changed in your settings and your firewall is blocking something. Also have you done all your windows updates for your pc? the references I have seen to the dll files you mentioned are all very very old and seem to have been fixed by windows updates, also most were involving Ie6 which version of IE do you have? The reason I ask about sp3 is that it has been found that people who did the sp3 update are now unable to get their updates to .net. There have been some work arounds for that issue. Article about that for anyone interested. XP Service Pack 3 blocks .NET security patches http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923100 and yet another question have you done all your java updates on that pc? and do you also have firefox browser? from what I have read those missing dll files should not be keeping you from connecting, they seem to be related to being able to click on links in webpages and having it take you to the appropriate pages. So I think you have 2 different problems, one the connect issue and 2 the dll problem. go to your event viewer Start> control panel> administrative tools> event viewer > there you will see 3 options in the left list double click each to open their logs look in each one to see if you have any red or yellow flags there, if you do you can hilight each one of those by clicking it then double click to open the info box on each item, look for any thing that says what is happening and what is causing it and any error codes.

you really really do need to update to either 7 or 8 that sp3 warning was for long ago when sp3 first came out and people were still using IE6 that should NOT be the case anymore because no one should be using IE6. Having it and using it is equivilant to turning off your antivirus program and your firewall you are walking a very dangerous path. Ie7 is perfectly fine I provided the link for the direct download on a recent thread but if you missed it here it is Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP why not at least go to 7 and then you can always go on to 8 later on. Start out the New Year on a safe footing.