Browsers Quit in Vista 64!

I recently bought a new HP Pavilion w/ Intel Core 2 quad processors, 4 GB memory, a DVD-RW drive, many smart-card readers, etc., loaded with Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I recently updated to SP 2. My problem is that just before that all my browsers, including IE began to stop working after a few minutes. I have tried all kinds of repairs, including many I have learned on this forum. I would hate like hell to reinstall my system, if I can avoid it. I though it might be due to SP 2, so I uninstalled it, but that turned out not to be the problem. I could always reinstall Vista back to its pristine state from the protected system partition and lose all my personalizations and tweaks, but I am loathe to do that.

Has anyone got an idea for me? I would not call myself a major geek, but I am not a newbie. I have been using and fixing my own computers and software since 1984. I have tried everything I know about. Please, a little help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

could you be a little more specific to the problem of the browsers stop working? Do they open up? can you go to various websites? does this happen in other browsers, like firefox or opera? have you inadvertently installed a toolbar (like google or yahoo) that is not compatible with 64bit windows?

 

I'd try booting in safe mode/networking and see if browsers work ok there if you haven't done that yet.

 

I tried SP2 for vista 64 bit and had problems. Reinstalled original vista 64 bit and everything is fine now. I didn't want to reinstall either, but could not find a fix for my problem.
This article's writer is no fan of SP2 either.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fa...osoft_updates_windows_vist.html?hpid=sec-tech

 

Lol, that guy is bootcamping Windows so he's already biased. Also states that it is a "boring" update which means nothing really went too wrong. Isn't that a good thing?