wierd web browsing problem--any ideas?

I just bought a desktop and laptop and have encountered a web browsing problem with both that I did not have on my old desktop. The old and new computers are running XP.

When I go the US Department of Education web site, ed.gov, I can access the home page as well as links in the page. However, I cannot open links in the banner--they seem to time out. I have tried using two different browsers (firefox and IE), have cleared the cache and cookies, made sure I have the latest versions of Java and Flash and nothing seems to work. These seem to be the only links I have trouble opening.

IT people at my company looked at my desktop and could not find any reason for this. Web folks the Dept of Ed were pretty unhelpful--all they did was point out that the links that I cannot open are jhtml while other links in the page that I can open are just html.

Any one have any ideas???

thanks!