Access to Secure Sites

My browsers, IE and Netscape, cannot access secure sites. This problem cropped up all of
a sudden, they were working fine. I contacted Cox and they spent quite a bit of time with me
going through all the configurations for IE (Privacy, Security, etc). Nothing solved the problem.
The tech said he thought it was a problem within Win XP. The browsers come up OK and
access regular sites but if I try to go to a secure site I get the error message
("can't connect, refused", etc).

If you can help I would surely be grateful. Please send your ideas to wbcarey@cox.net