Thanks, I have AVG incoming emails disabled. Today I received an
email with a jpg attachment and was still unable to open it. Should I
uninstall IE8, disable all spyware, virus protection, etc. and re-
install? Knowing Msoft, is this a big deal to perform?

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Simply disabling it normally doesn't work. You need to uninstall AVG, then
do a custom install, choosing not to install the email scanner. Then see
what happens.