OE – blocks hyperlinks in email

Hello, and thanks for your help in advance.

I am having an issues with Outlook Express and unfortunatly I cant remember when it started to track the cause.

If someone sends me a email that has a hyperlink in it, if I click on the link OE doesnt do anything and the link does not pop up in an IE window or anything.

I have tested it out, by temporarily dropping my privacy and security settings in IE down to low, turning the XPSP2 firewall off and ensuring that the security settings in OE itself such as block html contnet and prevent oe from opening attachments are all unchecked.

It just wont do anything with the link.. This occurs in any email I recieve and I have also tested links that I know should work by sending myself an email with a link.

Any ideas?