Hello Selina
I had terrific problems with IE8.
I read on a vista site that some machines had an automatic update with a patch ready for IE8 (I was on IE7 no problems).
Once you had this patch the vista forums were full of people like me who had downloaded the patch unknowingly then certain things would not work, like copy and paste, open attachments, send photos and more.
I found I could not uninstall IE8 and had a call to my computer maker. They suggested Firefox.
So I installed Firefox making sure I had set my email settings to the windows mail default as that was what I was using. Then I still had problems, but only after an automatic update.
This time when an error came up there was a direct link to microsoft then to this site - I will paste where you can uninstall IE8, which I did and now everything is working great again.
I am using Firefox with IE7 left in the background. I will never install IE8 again.
Good luck. Am signing off now, but will be back tomorrow if you want to ask anything.
Uninstall IE8 link
http://blogs.technet.com/fixit4me/archive/2009/03/18/uninstall-internet-explorer-8-fix-it-live.aspxSteven