Until recently I could not access one specific secure site. As I was using IE6, I 
tried Opera instead. With Opera I could access the secure site but no pictures on 
the site were displayed. Eventually I solved the problem, whatever the browser, by 
increasing the size of the MTU.

In a nutshell, if the TCP/IP packets are too small, a secure server thinks the information 
in the packet is possibly malicious and drops it. The requesting computer (my PC) 
sits there waiting and waiting until it finally times itself out. Apparently this 
can also be caused by either a router, firewall or computer (in the path between 
my computer and the secure server) which is blocking ICMP Code 3 Type 4 packets (whatever 
they are!), which blocks the sending computer or firewall from discovering the MTU 
path and/or size available. The solution is to increase the size of the MTU (maximum 
transfer unit). Beware, there is a maximum value of MTU.

I was browsing the Web and came across an article entitled: "Slow, Incomplete or 
No Access to Some Secure Online Banking Web Sites - by John Tolmachoff" at the following 
URL:

http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/onlinebanking.html

The above-mentioned article tells you how to change the MTU for Windows 2000 and 
Windows XP, but the Registry modification given cannot be used for Windows 98 or 
ME. However, I have the utility System Mechanic installed, which allows me to change 
the MTU for any Windows operating system, so I used System Mechanic to change the 
MTU on my PC. I set the MTU to 1492 (apparently the maximum allowable for my ADSL 
connection) and, lo and behold, I can now access the problematic secure site using 
IE6 with SSL 3.0 enabled.

So there we are. Not a bug in Windows, not a bug in IE, but a 'feature' of TCP/IP. 
If someone has a problem accessing all, some or only one specfic secure site, perhaps 
the size of the MTU is the cause of the problem. 

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