What happens when you right click on one of the X's and in the popup menu, select "Show Picture"? Does IE let you view the pictuers then?

Not a thing. Is there something I can do to get more memory allocated?

Go to System Properties (by right clicking on My Computer or via the Control panel). Then choose the Advanced Tab. Then click the Performance settings button. Click the advanced tab. Allocate more virtual memory. Virtual memory is hard drive space that the computer can use as RAM if your computer has used up all of the RAM it has. It's much slower, but it's much better than nothing, too. Virtual memory is known as a pagefile in Windows and as swap space in Linux.

From the Tools menu, select 'Internet Options'
click on the 'advanced' tab
make sure there is a ticked box next to 'Show Pictures' it's under the multimedia section.

How much memory (physical RAM, not virtual memory) do you have? Unless you have only a very small amount of RAM, the problem is probably elsewhere.

Has this always been a problem, or did it just happen suddenly? If the later, were you changing anything on your system around the time the problem first appeared (think carefully...)?

Tools -> Internet Options -> General

Click on 'Delete Files' to clean out your Internet cache. Also ensure 'Show Pictures' is enabled as mentioned previously.

That may not work, but often an excess of 'temporary internet files' will cause problems like this. You could also try a repair of Internet Explorer.

Well, "show pictures" is definitely checked, so it's not that. Internet cache is clean. It did just start (I can't remember what prompted it - sorry Dani) and it's only in certain instances. How do I do a repair IE?

Thanks for the help.

Which Windows version do you have? Which version of Internet Explorer are you using?

^^ too many people are trying to help you Scott, but do tell what Catweazle asks, it would help us a lot..