hurchin 0 Newbie Poster

I regularly use IE6. If I leave my machine for an hour or so, when I return, I cannot access any web pages. To get it to respond again, I have to restart the system. This is true for both of my Windows computers. I have Windows XP Pro on both machines. I connect to the web using a DirecWay (now Hughes.net) 6000 system. When both of my Windows machines went down a few months ago, I temporarily used my Linux machine using Firefox and had no problems at all. It was on for about a month and never had a break in service or a need to restart the system. When I got my Windows machines repaired (new hard drives and fresh load of Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Zone Alarm, AVG Free, HTML Kit, and Smart FTP - I also added Spybot and AdAware SE Personal which were not on my prior Windows machines and changed from Cute HTML and FTP to HTML Kit and Smart FTP). I changed to Firefox thinking that IE6 may be the problem. However, I have the same problem, whether I'm using IE6 or Firefox on my Windows machines. Most of the time I can still access email, but there are a few times where I've not been able to download email from the internet. I connect to the web through a BEFSR41 LinkSys Cable Router. When I watch the DirecWay 6000 system when I try to access a web page, there is no indication that the message is being uploaded to request the page, so it seems that my problem may be before it gets to my DirecWay box. Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated. However, I will need very specific directions as I'm not very computer savy. Thanks.

Joyce