We just installed Windows 2000 Server on our new Dell PE2650 along with AD (making it the root of a brand new forest on its own new domain), IIS, and Exchange 2000. We set up DNS by deleting the root “.” forward lookup zone and enable fowarders to the 2 real DNS servers. By REAL I mean actual root DNS servers. We pointed the TCP/IP settings of our server’s NIC to itself for DNS (which fowards to the other DNS servers just fine) and setup IE to use our proxy server (totally separate, standalone,proxy server). It should be noted we are a department of our university’s campus so the 2 root DNS, and the proxy server belong to them. This is the crazy part: DNS resolves the IP of the friendly names you type in IE, but the page never loads. To troubleshoot, we installed Opera 7 and BAM! web page heaven! We had the university guys watch the traffic to and from our server using Opera, then IE. Come to find out IE was TOTALLY BYPASSING THE PROXY SERVER and trying to connect straight to the webserver you wanted. My question (finally) is this: Why would IE not use the proxy server set in it? (We have tried all the different ways of the advanced options: Do not use proxy for these addresses, Bypass proxy for local, etc.)