Have a Windows 98 SE. Lost IE a few months ago (not sure why - fires up but no connection to the server) but Opera, OE, MIRC worked. Upgraded to ME and lost the connection to everything. Any ideas why?

That's a pretty broad description of the problem, could you be more specific?

What type of Internet connection do you have?
What devices are involved in your setup?
When you say "lost everything", what exactly do you mean?
What exact errors (if any) do you get when you try to connect?

Giving us as much information as possible will help us help you get things going the most quickly.

Upgraded to ME === not really considered a update any more . in my humble opinion never was a good update .!!

We can get an internet connection with our ISP ... but no applications work now ... IE, Opera, OE, MIRC .... they basically say they cannot connect with the server ... not sure what has happened ... I can usually figure out what might have caused it but in this case there was nothing specific that you could point to and say it had caused it... maybe a virus has altered Registry items?

If you have problems on your system, and then do an upgrade install of a newer OS over the top of it, leaving your programs and data in place, you most likely won't fix things. It's more likely that you'll make the problems worse.

Arguments about the quality of Windows Me aside (I personally had no problems with it back in the day) the best couse of action you could take would be to back up your data files, format, and perform a fresh, clean install of Windows and your programs.

It's possible that a virus or "malware" program has broken your connectivity- some of those nasties can do that. Have you scanned your system for viruses and other malicious programs with the latest versions of detection and removal tools? You can find out much more about the problems caused by malicious programs and how to remove them by reading many of the threads in our Security forum.

When you say that you can get an Internet connection, could we verify that by doing the following?:

Click the the "Run..." option under your Start menu and type "cmd" (omit the quotes) in the dialog box; this will open a DOS window. At the command prompt in the window, try the following commands and let us know what the results are:

ping 127.0.0.1
ping localhost
ping www.google.com
ping 64.233.167.99