Internet Explorer 6 issues on WinXP

First of all, thank you to all who post here. I have
searched the archives for a resolution to my problem and
have not yet been able to dig one up.

On my wife's WinXP box, Internet Explorer 6 SP1 has started
to be unreliable. Here are some instances:

1) When I go into Help / About IE, there is no version and
2) When I click on OK to close the "About" window, it stays
open.
3) I recently installed Norton Internet Security on the
box. It seems that NIS uses the version of IE that is
installed on the box to display its screens. On each of
those screens, when I click on a link to configure the
software, I get an IE "page not found" error.
4) I was going to attempt to use System Restore to go back
a week or two to see if the problem would disappear and the
System Restore window is a blank page.

I was given a tip to remove the instances of "hide" in the
SYSOC.INF file in Windows / INF to see more applications in
Add and Remove Programs window. Once I did this, I was
able to revert to my prior IE install but all that did was
to remove SP1. I am still at IE 6.0. I was able to find
the version number in the registry.

If anyone has seen something similar to this or has any
ideas whatsoever, I would greatly appreciate some help.

Thank you very much.

Internet Explorer 6 issues on WinXP