I have always tried to avoid IE. But my new employer gave me a notebook that only has IE and I need it to work before Monday. The computer sees that it is connected to my wireless, signal excellent, has IP address... but IE will not find anything. I would assume it is a setting of some sort. It does the same thing with wired connection as well. Windows finds the connection, but IE doesn't seem to use it. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks.

Like you, I've never been a big fan of IE but IE7 is not that bad. I worked out that by the time IE14 comes out it might be as good as Firefox 2 but there you go!!!

Anyway, you could check whether there are any dial up conections on your laptop and see if IE is set to only use these. If you do not use dial up then delete them so that IE only has one choice to connect - via LAN.

Open the Internet Options (either via the control panel of IE itself) then click the Connections tab. Check here to see if there are any dial up connections, if there are, delete them. Click on the LAN settings and clear all checks in the check boxes, if there are any. Restart IE and see if it tries to connect.

You may have to reboot your laptop. If nothing happens after an IE restart, then reboot it.

Let me know how you get on.