I finally figured it out. Thanks for the link to the posts but I found a solution not mentioned in those posts which corrected the problem.

Adobe Flash Player won't run on IE8
There was a command string that was telling IE8 to start with add ons disabled even though they appeared enabled. The command string was deleted and IE8 started with all add ons running normally.

Adobe Flash Player won't run on Firefox
Java was disabled on Firefox, enabled Java and problem corrected

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my posts and offer some solutions, I greatly appreciate your efforts. Hopefully, my fixes will help others with similar problems

Thanks again
Halder