Well, I have to say that this one has me beat . Unless you get any other responses, I suggest that you either reformat or system restore back to before this started happening. Sorry.

Hi Crunchie. I want to thank you VERY MUCH for all your help. What I did was go back to system restore. That cured it. Remember I said I thought it started happening right after an update. You asked me about SP2. Well since I went back to restore it removed my updates, so I wanted to find out which one it was. I turned of automatic updates and started custom updating, one at a time and giving the system a reboot and surfing and such to try to get the Invalid Syntax Error to show it's ugly head. There were a total of 6 updates available, and after doing that for everyone it was the last one that caused the problem. It is Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer Windows XP Service Pack 2 KB890923. Will it be ok if I don't update that particular one or is there a way to get it cleaned up?? Again Thanks for your help.
Mike

I have that one on my comp too with no probs. On investigating, it looks like that particular update is for users with SP1, not SP2.

http://www.softwarepatch.com/internet/ie6sp1fixes.html