Probably as a result of some kind of virus/trojan I had my Internet Explorer in XP reporting its version as 3.00 and not 6.0 SP1. IE in the "Help/About" screen showed 3.0, and in the "System Info" screen it showed 3.0, but the appearance and function were unchanged. If you look in IE and looked at the "file version" of individual files they were all 6.0.2800 ect, so they were all correct, obviously only the Version was changed. Right now I know you are asking yourself "well, so what?". The problem is, you can not access services.msc, which is what you had to do to kill this trojan, unless you have IE 5.5 or higher, and you could not run the IE6 upgrade off of the Microsloth site and would not allow you to access the Windoze update site either. Pretty nasty bug.
I ended up reinstalling XP and that fixed the IE version problem, and ultimately fixed everything else too.
