IE favorites do not show

I have a friend who uses IE and her favorites will not show up when she clicks on favorites (they are not there) although she has added the websites to her favorites and if she opens the favorites folder under users/owner/ etc. they are in that folder but she can’t access them from IE. I upgraded her from IE 7 to IE 8 but still the same problem. When she clicks on “organize favorites” she gets a error message saying they can’t be opened. Any suggestions.