IE6 won't access internet

[gow]

Hi

I'm running IE6 SP1 on XP Professional. This problem started a few days ago.
IE6 loads up but doesn't load my home page or any other pages. Just sits on a blank page with the hour-glass running forever. No error message. Will display an "Action Cancelled" mesage when I hit the Stop button.

Firefox works with no problems at all.

Tried upgrading to IE7 beta2 but the problem remained.

At the same time this problem started, my Outlook 2000 stopped displaying HTML content in received messages. All that is displayed is text and links with no graphic content (displays outline rectangle with an "x" where HTML content would normally be). Don't know if this is related to IE6 problem.

Thought about running System File Checker but unfortunately my DLLCache directory has been deleted in the past, so a lot of newer files will get overwritten if I do this.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers
gow