https not working on Windwos XP SP2 laptop

I am hoping someone here can help me with a problem with my son's Dell
Inspiron 5150 laptop computer. He brought it back from college this weekend
with major problems. Basically nothing was working at all... he confided
that it had gotten a virus, so he had been uninstalling everything and then
attempted re-formatting and re-installing Windows XP Pro. It was basically
a mess, but I managed to re-install the Dell laptop drivers that were
missing and completed the XP "upgrade" installation from his original SP1
CD-ROM disk. I then loaded SP2 from
another disk we had used previously from another home computer.

When I was done, I ran AdAware anti-spam software, Norton Anti-Virus, then
cleared out all the old files and de-fragmented the system. At this point
everything seemed to be working very well since we could connect to the
Internet, browse sites, get Instant Messenger services, email etc. and the
computer seemed to be performing very well speed wise.

It was only when we tried to go to the Windows Update site to get the rest
of the most recent updates that we noticed that it would not browse any
https (secure) sites at all. I've verified that there is no proxy set and
that the firewall, Internet security, and advanced settings appear to be
good by comparing them to a working machine on the same DSL connection.

At this point I suspect it could possibly be a problem with the computer's
SSL certificate,
but am not sure how to verify it is loaded and valid. Can someone direct me
on the keystroke/cursor sequence for accomplishing this? Also, does anyone
have any other things that I can check? It is probably something very
simple that is incorrectly set or missing, but we just can't seem to find
it. If no one here has any thoughts then we plan to simply re-format the
drive and start from scratch.

Again, the only symptom we see is a failure when attempting to open or being
re-directed to "secure" web sites. Thanks in advance for your help.

Bob


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