internet and email headaches

I have 4 headaches, that I'm aware of. maybe a 5th...
I'm running on WinXP, service pack 2, OE email, AVGFree security.
I'm a genealogist, but since over a month ago I can't post my emails to the chat lists that Ancestry.com runs. Ancestry says that AVG attaches an attachment to my emails and that when they updated things that was blocked. I have my suspicions because a lot of genealogists use AVG, but I don't hear about this problem from them. AVG also puts a signature at the bottom of my emails, but I think that's ok with Ancestry. so I went to AVG's forum. can't log in. ask for a new password. it comes, but it doesn't work, either. not one that's hard to read, so no idea what's wrong. so I try for an hour to find some way to tell AVG they've got a bug of some sort (or so I believe), but to no avail. got the royal run-around. so at a near point of complete frustration and exasperation, I click on majorgeeks in my favorites list, and get an error message-Internet explorer cannot open the website. fortunately the tool bar at the top shows just as the error does, and is active, or I wouldn't have made it into here.
Thank you for any advice on how to untangle this mess and get things working properly again.
oh, about the same time that I originally started having problems of another sort with Ancestry (back in March), all incoming emails had attachments shown by a paperclip on the side, yet not all emails had an actual attachment that I could find. this stopped just about the time (you guessed it) that I stopped being able to email queries to Ancestry's lists. however, apparently my emails still go out showing attachments. could this be occuring with my server (which for the past month has seemed a bit unstable to me)?