I've encountered this strange problem, which I can't seem to correct.

Brand new Dell Latitiude D420 laptop, running WINXP Prof SP2
Internet Explorer V 6.0 installed.
AVG anti-virus (paid for, not free edition)

When I connect to the internet, every web page visited does not display correctly. Problem is that background color, or colors is / are always white. Text content, links and images do however seem to be displayed correctly and WORK fine. I have searched on the microsoft.com website which suggests a remedy under the following link

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/277008/en-us

however, the 'Ignore colors specified on Web pages' checkbox is already unchecked.

I have since installed Firefox v2.0 to see if it is an IE problem only, but the problem is still present there, so it seems to be independent of web browser.

I did check and COMPARE all of the Firefox settings against my other desktop computer (Dell, also recently purchased but running XP Home edition), and in as far as the options are the same the settings are identical.

I have not managed to find much else on this type of problem on the internet. The comnputer only connected to the internet for the first time this week, and has not been used for general browsing at all.

Any SUGGESTIONS welcome! It is probably using default system colors. Those might be colors that you have selected for background, desktop, etc. IE will default to the selected system colors, but in Firefox you can set them to anything you want. When setting colors in Firefox, deselect "Use system colors".Brand new? Have you contacted Dell? They have great support and this ma be a known issue.yThanks for the quick responses!

I had already looked at the 'Colors' options in Firefox. Although the 'Use System Colors' checkbox was checked, the 'Allow Pages to choose their own colors.....' box was also checked, which I understand overrides the 'Use System colors
' box. Just to be sure, I have now however, unchecked the USC box as well, but it makes no difference.

I had not made any changes to the default settings on Windows XP, IE or Firefox.

One mistake I made earlier though. The IE version installed is actually the new IE 7 rather than 6. I believe when Firefox installs it takes various of its settings from IE if that has already been installed. I will try uninstalling IE 7, load IE 6 and see if this shows the same problems.

Can you post an address to one of these white websites?Fed - Thanks for your suggestion. I have attached a .jpg showing comparisons between the correct and as viewed formats for two homepages. The 'correct' screenshots on lhs are from my desk station, the screenshots with 'white' backgrounds are on rhs.

I've noticed some icons are also missing on the Yahoo homepage.Great work, I can see exactly what you mean.
Can you post the addresses to those sites, I can't quite make them out.They're www.bbc.co.uk and www.uk.yahoo.com. However, all web pages I've visited where I'm familiar with their 'normal' look, are similarly affected.

Ticking and unticking the 'Ignore colors specified on Web pages' is changing my browser alternatively between the screens you put up so I guess I can say, "It works for me"
Have you cleared your browser history & cache and refreshed your screen in conjunction with unticking that box?
Make sure you click OK after changing any settings too.Just to keep you all up to date, I took the computer to work today and PLUGGED it into our site network, wanting to show the problem to our Administrator to get his opinion. Murphy's law dictated that it worked perfectly OK when I did this, web pages display correctly.

I will try it again at home tonight. The only difference I can think of is that at home I use a 3Com wireless broadband modem router to access the internet. I have found that the problem is present at home whether I connect wirelessly or via a cable. Possibly there is a firewall issue in play here.We'll keep the light on. Interesting.

Let me know if you ever fixed the issue.

My dad's web pages also look exactly like yours, all of a sudden.  I'm CURIOUS about that firewall issue, although I doubt he fussed with the firewall.  He contacts AOL help a lot, so maybe they had him change a setting.Ok, I finally got the problem sorted today.

I spoke with one of our network adminstrators at work today, who suggested that the fact that web pages displayed perfectly when connected via my work network indicated a firewall or profile issue. When logging onto the network at work, the Windows firewall is automatically switched off and various profile settings are applied.

Upon trying the computer on my home network, I manually switched off the Windows Firewall fully expecting this to fix the problem. Unfortunately this was not the case, the problem was still present. Eventually, after some more searching on the internet I found a reference to web page display problems in the Firefox knowledge base at

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Website_colors_are_wrong

The suggestion which fixes the problem is unchecking the high contrast box in the Windows Settings at

Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Accessibility -> Display -> uncheck "Use High Contrast", restart the application

I'm not sure why this was checked, presumably as a Dell installation default. I'm guessing that when I log onto my work network my profile settings apply and uncheck this box automatically.

Thanks to all for earlier suggestions, I hope the above information is helpful to others

  Many thanks for the feedback. [smiley=thumbup.gif]