possible weird java/netflix ie6/7 problem?

I have been looking around & i don't think i see the answer to this in another post already, so if it's out there, i'm sorry for not looking hard enough...i'll try to be clear...
we have a fresh install of windows xp sp2 on this computer.... we normally use firefox..... we have the current java software (JRE version 1.6.0_07) and the most updated IE7 software....
I won't pretend to know very much, but i'll tell you what i know & what i've been told...
i know my old computer just had xp on it & I don't know what else & it worked pretty well.
My goal is to be able to be able to do the streaming video thing with Netflix "Instant Watch".... I was able to do this fine before the fresh install of windows xp sp2... actually, i always used firefox with the IE tab and just watched from there...
Now nothing that involves my IE & Netflix work together.
I can log onto netflix in FF and browse around, add to my que,etc.... the only thing i can't do is watch.... if i click to use the IE tab, it pushes me to the netflix.com login page. when i attempt to login, the page just sits there and in the left hand corner, it says "done" and theres the yellow warning triangle... when i double click, i get:
"Error On Page
Problems with this webpage might prevent it from being displayed properly or functioning properly. In the future you can display this message by double clicking the warning icon....
Line: 15
CHar: 3139
Error: No such interface Supported.
Code: 0
URL: http://www.netflix.com/login"

If i go straight to Internet Explorer and open up netflix.com and try to login from there, i get the same error message... so... i am realizing there is a problem with my internet explorer ...i started with IE7... someone suggested it was messed up & i downgrade. which i did. didn't matter. so... i am back at IE7.... i thought maybe it was just a bad install.
I called Netflix after a week and a half of web searching to see if the smart computer folks out there had any idea what the world the problem could be... i haven't seen anything that's just like this... the netflix guys actually stayed on the line with me for about 25 minutes... the walked me through trying to manually register some .dll files on my computer (something like that...) to see if that would make IE and java work together & it didn't ... they seemed confident that the problem was with IE & Java however.

so.. for me it was a starting point to ask...
oh... when i was thinking about it...another site i had to use IE to watch streaming video from was abc.com... it doesn't work now either... ???

has anyone heard of this?... does anyone have any idea what the fix could possibly be???
I apologize in advance if i did not give all of the necessary information... i haven't had to do this before...