Well, it sorta fixed itself. I tried upgrading to IE 6.0 to see if the problem would right itself when upgrading with newer drivers and executable. That didn't work so frustrated I tried running the IE diagnostic, didn't know 6.0 had one till I got in and played with it, that didn't do anything either. Pissed I uninstalled 6.0 to revert back to the 5.5, upon restart and after the machine updated it's registry the darned thing worked! Was bizarre, only thing I can think of is it might be part of that ME registry/restore feature.
Ohwell, the way this all started was I downloaded Audiogalaxy to update to the newest required version. Well as part of the install the stupid program had some stupid worthless Gem called "Gator" which I really didn't want installed, upon uninstalling the pile of crap gator program it kicked IE into gear sending me to a webpage survey so they could ask why I was uninstalling their program. I'm thinking that while the uninstall program was simultaneously working having IE booting up at the same time was bad juju, immediately after killing the gator program I noticed IE caved in on itself.
But man, a weight has been lifted now that I don't have to rely on nutscrape to surf the net.