Recently I was faced with a windows XP service pack 2 PC running internet explorer 7, with microsoft office 2000 on. All service packs were up to date.
Microsoft Outlook was unable to display HTML e-mails, and both system restore and windows search open blank, apart from the toolbar on the left hand side which includes the ‘dog’ desktop helper.
I had tried removing internet explorer version 7, all the way back to internet exlporer 5. This made no difference. I then tried reinstalling XP Service Pack 3, but to no avail.
We had 2 seperate devices with the same issue on the network, one a laptop the other was a desktop.
After many hours of head scratching and googling.. I managed to find a solution!!
You can download IEFix from here