Yet another IE and Win 2000 Problem

[Quiet Thunder]

This problem is one I can't seem to understand. I recently upgraded from Win 98Se to Win 2000. I'm running a Amd 800
T-Bird with a KT7-Raid Mobo. I'm also running IE ver. 5.0 I'm on a small network which splits a Cable modem. Now, whenever I start up IE, it tells me that I'm not connected and gives me the option to work offline or try again. If I click Try Again, everything comes up, and I can surf normally. This is not a hugh problem, but I thought a very odd one. Has anyone herd of this? I've noticed that this only happens the first time I start IE. This has only started happening after I upgraded to Win 2000. I also do not have a problem if I run my email client first (Outlook 2000) or if I run the Norton update utility. I'm assuming that this is a IE problem, but I'd rather not upgrade to vers. 5.5 as I've has some problems with that browser. Thanx in advance.

[Student^2]

I doubt this is your problem, but I had something similar. Turned out to be the NIC was going into sleep mode (ACPI again), and IE timed out before it woke up. I fixed it by disabling ACPI, but I'm sure you could tweak the time-out factor of IE to get a better solution.