Internet explorer lockup

Hello,
One of our machines ,win98, started not finishing loading internet explorer.We have road runner and also an aol acount. AOL loads just fine,I downloaded a new version of IE and when installing it even had to download files from the internet which it did with no problem. But Still when I start IE it loads,says it’s done, but the blue status bar doesn’t go away and it just sits there. Then I have to “ctrl-alt-del” to get out.
PS I also did a scanreg to set back the registry a couple of days and ran norton utilities to clean up the registry.