Problems with IIS in WinXP

I hope someone here can help me with my problem. I've had IIS running on my
setup of WinXP for a bit now, all updates from the MS Update page have been
applied. For some reason, IIS doesn't want to display webpages and I'm at a
loss to explain why. I first noticed it when I tried to update a website
using Visual Studio .Net 2003 which uses .Net Framework 1.1. VS said it
couldn't get to the website and mentioned something about the website timing
out or something like that. I then tried to access my website through the
IIS Snap-in. I've yet to be able to browse a website. However, I can
initially go into the websites and look at files. However, after a bit of
exploring the folders inside the snap-in, it can't even find the files.
Sometimes opening a folder to a website gives me an error message about
unable to find the file or whatever. I've tried stopping and rerunning the
website with no success. I've tried to use Internet Explorer and browse to
websites on my system but I always get an error telling me it's unable to
find a file or the page cannot be displayed. I know good and well the
files/folders are there and the webserver/service is running, but it acts
like it can't find anything. I've uninstalled IIS and reinstalled it (along
with the FTP and SMTP services). It hasn't solved the problem. I can't
even browse to localhost in Internet explorer.

I don't mind reinstalling the OS from scratch in order to solve my problem.
Thing is, this has happened multiple times in the past. The only solution I
could find was to reinstall everything from scratch. I could do reinstall
from scratch again, but how long will it be before this problem happens
again and I have to repeat the process (this install lasted 1.5 - 2 months)?
Quite frankly, doing the reinstall routine is getting old and I'd rather
solve the problem.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks in advance.

Chris Smith