I'm posting this in this forum because I can't find a general IE forum and I'm currently running Win7. Let me start by saying that I've been one of Microsoft's biggest supporters for years. All my fellow nerds are running out and getting their iPhones and Droids, downloading Firefox, Safari, Chrome or whatever the browser of the week is, and I've been plugging away with the current version of IE on the current Windows platform, with my HTC TP2 running WM6.5 in my pocket. Today I saw a banner ad that said "download IE8 - optimized for Bing and MSN". I had to chuckle. Regardless of your opinion of Bing v. Google, Bing is CLEARLY trailing by a huge margin. And I don't know anyone who's happy with the new MSN design. So my initial reaction was "cool - IE8 is designed to work with TWO web sites! And they're ones no one uses!" Up to this point, this post is just miscellaneous rambling. Right after I saw that banner ad, I also saw something about Office 2010 being available for download, so I go to the volume licensing web site to get it. Tried both ways, the download manager and HTTP. With the download manager it just immediately says the download has been halted (even though I didn't halt it). Just can't get it to do anything. With HTTP, IE displays a page that says the web site has declined to display the page with the most likely cause being that I need to log in (I AM logged in...) Just for the ____ of it, I tried Firefox. Boom, no problem. File's downloading nicely thank you. If Microsoft can't make their own products work with their own products, they're going to be on a slippery slope to obscurity. Oh, and I've got something from games.msn.com going on one screen and I'm logged in to Technet on the other screen. Knowing full well that I shouldn't do it, I click "sign out" on the Technet screen. Hey, guess what? The game that was in progress just got signed out. Messenger? Nope, that's still running just fine. Our firewall vendor has a web page for administration of the device. They say it's written for IE and they don't actually support Firefox. When I use IE to make a change, I wait up to 45 seconds for the page to refresh saying the change has been made. Firefox? 2-3 seconds. I'm very close to making Firefox my default browser just because I have things I need to do other than troubleshooting why I can't do anything.