Amazed and appalled
I am amazed and appalled. All this time I've been badmouthing IE for its major problems (after I was forced to upgrade from 5 to 5.5 for the stupid Intuit TurboTax, then downgraded, then tried to upgrade to 6 to fix problems) - and it was apparently caused by CookieCop 1.2, a free cookie- and site-blocking Windows utility from PC Magazine. I switched to Privoxy a while ago, and now I can go to Windows Update and IE works properly!
Son of a ...
Update:
I didn't upgrade CookieCop because PCMag charges for the latest versions. If they fixed the bugs, bully for them - I'm just not willing to shell out $ to test it.