Ted S 0 Light Poster

Some time yesterday I tried to access a password protected folder of a website (htaccess) and it never loaded up. A day later and about 10 different websites and I seem to have a real problem... any time I try and access a site with htaccess password protection the promt box never opens and the site never responds, it just times out. I've tried resetting security settings, even using FireFox instead of IE but to no avail. Does anyone have any ideas?