Cannot Download

What about the "Content Advisor"?

Need more info: OS? Browser? Updates? Have you tried right-clicking download links and selecting Save Target As (or equivalent)?

This sounds like a security thing in his browser. I just tried it in Internet Explorer - I went to OPTIONS/SECURITY - and disabled downloads. Then I went to Tucows and tried downloading a file and it told me I couldn't do that for security reasons.

Agreed that more information would be helpful -- but this sort of behaviour is often exhibited by some of the meaner sorts of spyware -- so my first suggestion would be to check the system with *several* spyware eliminators [Spybot Search & Destroy and Microsoft Antispyware Beta] to see if this is in fact the case.

The next thing to try is to get a copy of MOZILLA FireFox, and see if the pattern persists. Using INTERNET EXPLORER is a bad idea in any case.

This is from Microsoft and indicates that it may be a damaged index.dat file. Although it syas IE 5.5, it's worth a shot to try and fix any version of IE to see if it does the trick.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=306837

I agree, need more info. Is this at home, with a relatively simple internet connection, or is there a Proxy, Firewall, or other "corporate" style of machine/software in the invironment?

Even in the simple case, is this puter running some sort of Personal Firewall or other service that limits access/port/function (e.g. download)? XP SP2 made a lot of changes in this subject area, and may have been installed without the user's knowledge.

Finally, can the user install _anything_, even from a CD-ROM or (gulp) floppy? May be a User Rights issue.

Jim

Do a search on your computer, locate the "Hosts" file, & open it using Notepad (not Wordpad). If it has more than a very few settings - & you didn't put them there - then your machine has been hacked. Hosts determines just which Web-sites you can & can't access. Fixing the file can be a bit tricky if you don't know what's supposed to be there, but browse to http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm for a good place to start.

It sounds like you are not logged on under administrator and the computer sees you as a user. Only the administrator can download if you have your computer set up that way.
-Olen