IE7 and connection manager

[George27]

Every so often I try reinstalling ie7 and tried again on a newly built pc. The same problems occured, that is every time I start up a program that has the ability to connect to the internet the connection window appears even though there is a connection present. Closing the window disconnects the dsl service. I looked at the MS news groups and the only solution they give is to set all the programs individually to a "assume connected to..." setting. There was rollup this month, has this been fixed in that patch? Or does anyone know of any work around other than the ms news group solution. Secondly rolling back to ie6 breaks the ability to read *.chm files. I get a blank page which can only be fixed by a repair installation of xp. tia