Curious - If from the IE6 menu bar if you choose Help / About ... what version does it show ?

Are you shure you don't have Ie7 and just have tab'ed browsing turned off ? Turn it on from the menu item Tools / Internet Options / from the General tab choose the Tabs Settings button.

We have no option to turn tabs on or off, under help it says we have vs 6 and that is what it looks like. My DH has vs7 still on his laptop, I don't understand where it went on this computer. The only thing he said he did is add the Google toolbar.

Also, I was trying to go through Windows Update to see if that would do it, but all I get is a blank page, shouldn't I at least get a notice saying no updates available?

Sounds like it never installed, if it did its install screwed up somehow.

Look in your add/remove programs in control panel and uninstall it.

Then after a days time and a couple of reboots have passed if windows updates offers it accept the install only after turning your virus program off and your firewall too if you feel comfortable doing so.
After the install and you see ie7 working, turn back on the firewall and virus programs.

You do have a for-real registered version of windows ?

It is not listed under add/remove, nor is IE6, the only place vs 6 is listed is under window components.

Yes our windows is registered and as I said we did have IE7 before, it just disappeared somehow and we are unable to reinstall it we did disable antivirus 1st.

Also should say Windows has updated several times since we lost IE 7 and it doesn't ask if we want to accept something it just does it automatically.

When IE7 installs it moves IE6 into the Windows folder and puts IE7 in your Program Files;
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"

You might go there and right click iexplore.exe choose properties and see if it shows as IE7 - if so, double click it. Hopefully once started it will take over and continue to work.

....
You might go read about System File Checker(support.micosoft.com) and run it...
SFC Â /scanonce
That will fix corrupt files and drivers and some of their configurations too.

One way to repair Internet Explorer and numerious other problems is to reinstall SP2 ... assuming you're on XP.

Being how you cant access update.microsoft.com you may have to search for and download xp sp2 at download.microsoft.com.

Just a thought. Could you possibly have blocked it somehow? I've had it blocked for a long time. Unblocked and downloaded it this week. Hated it so removed it and re-blocked from my DL files.

I am not sure what you mean by blocked. How would you block it? We have tried downloading it several times. The weird thing is the last time we tried, even though it says we are downloading IE 7, we clicked on properties and it said it was vs 6, didn't make sense at all, but it seems the only thing we can install is vs 6. We did re install SP2 and yes we are on XP. Also we have been able to since access microsoft updates, don't know what the hang up was there before.

There is a forum that has a special microsoft area that is maned by some great microsoft MVM folks, I would suggest you go there and post your question in the microsoft area, they will likely be able to help you out.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/microsoft

be very specific and give all the details you can including your system info.