Sorry forgot to give the obvious details

Packard Bell computer - quite old now - about 5 years.
Running on Windows 98 with everything else on Windows 2000
Last installed Internet explorer 6.0
previous installed kazaa , but this had been working fine.
Than had Zafi virus, which I deleted yesterday
Also uninstalled P2P

I am suspecting I have spyware on my harddrive. But not sure.
Tried downloading the free software from www.spyware.com but the webpages came up with an error message.

Hope anyone can help me as it is very frustrating not being able to do anything I need to do.

Try going to Control Panel\Folder Options\File Types & highlight the file extension type you want & set it to associate with IE.

Thanks Crunchie,

Tried that over the weekend, but found had another problem, the IE icon had disappeared. I have tried to reinstall my software. It seems I have the file iexplorer.exe missing, not sure what happened. Probably happened during one of my virusscans. Managed to get the webpages to be IE again, icon wise. but now I have a problem with getting into my normal internet. Need to do some more work here.
What is the best way to proceed. if I am missing iexplorer.exe, and reinstalling the software did not seem to work, do I need to use the boot disk to start all over again. Or should I do something different? I do not really want to use the boot disk as it may wipe all my downloaded software packages (would it?) Help.