Hmmm! I forget where I found the information, but there was something a few days ago about fixing security settings in light of all the recent "invasions." It gave specific settings to use and one was to disable java in IE. That surprised me, because a lot of sites have things that need java, but I tried it. So, that's probably the reason.
Any opinion as to whether I should leave it disabled, or if it doesn't matter and I might as well re-enable it?