Windows XP Home SP1 clean install odd IE behavior

[DaveLembke]

Had a strange issue happen with a clients system that I rebuilt.

Its a Shuttle computer with a AMD Sempron 3100+ with 1GB DDR 333Mhz RAM and 160 GB IDE HDD.

Installed all drivers from Shuttles website and no problems there, however IE wouldnt go anywhere. Yahoo, Google, etc all came up with errors as site unresolved check your settings.

Pinged sites with no problems. Rebooted system, and problem remained.

Used SP2 and SP3 discs on the system to bring it to XP Home SP3 and after the SP2 disc was used IE then was able to get to Google and elsewhere, but at SP1 it was useless. All settings were default for IE at SP1.

Anyone know why SP1 clean would have done this? Is it really that old that that version of IE is useless until you upgrade to SP2 which includes a browser upgrade?

I brought his system to SP3 and fully patched although microsoft update site seems not very user friendly for XP with every page trying to sell you Windows 8. His system isnt worth investing any money into it, the motherboard is a socket 754 and it there are no multicore CPU 's available for it.

He just uses it for web surfing and e-mail so its fine for all he needs it for. The GPU is so weak in it as well with a VIA 32MB in which when I went to look at the radar map of the weather site you could see that the GPU was weak in how it rendered the radar maps weakly.

I was hoping he had a socket 939 or AM2 board so that I could give him a dual core and stretch the life of the hardware, but the only option he has for any performance boost is to stuff the AGP slot with like a Geforce 4 MX440 with 64MB or 128MB video memory, but the CPU being so weak its kind of pointless to even do that.

I am tempted to recreate the clean install of XP Home SP1 to see if it does the same problem in virtual environment, however I dont have any time to burn in something that is kind of pointless since he is fine with it running on SP3 now. I also installed the latest Firefox to it and free AVG antivirus since MSSE no longer supports XP.

[patio]

Was SP 2 installed as well ? ?...still no joy-joy i would DLoad and install an older IE ver...or install FireFox.

[DaveLembke]

Regarding

Was SP 2 installed as well ? ?...still no joy-joy i would DLoad and install an older IE ver...or install FireFox.

The system was ok after SP2 was run on it from the CD that Microsoft shipped to my business years ago. It only had this issue under clean SP1 build, and the XP Home SP1 Disc was free of defects, no scratches etc, so I doubted that IE was corrupt at clean install.

Sorry if this might not have been clear.

Used SP2 and SP3 discs on the system to bring it to XP Home SP3 and after the SP2 disc was used IE then was able to get to Google and elsewhere, but at SP1 it was useless. All settings were default for IE at SP1.

The system that had this issue is also running fine now after SP2 was installed to it after clean build. I then installed SP3 to it and then patched to latest after fighting with Microsofts website that doesnt make it easy to patch to fullest anymore as for they are promoting ditching XP and buying 8. I finally found a link at MS site that ran a script that allowed patching to the latest. I tried setting auto updates for like 3pm and then setting the system time to 2:59pm and then wait and watch network activity and when the clock hit 3pm on the PC. It didnt do anything, no network or HDD activity to indicate that the update that was scheduled was going to run, so I went to their site and found a path to get the updates pushed to it from SP3 to last patches. 

I no longer have this system and gave it back to client running fine patched to fullest and instead of using IE that behaved from SP2 onwards, I have him on Firefox and he is fine with Firefox.