it gave him some message about his Age Cutoff. He can't even access the Internet, which he only used to view his home page, the news, baseball forums, and some research about Ford. Well, this guy's an engineer for Ford and a C programmer--of course he's old enough. Even worse, some one also changed his password to access the part of the Control Panel you use to manage age levels.
I do not understand this, there is nothing in IE about "age cutoff" that I can see, or find in the helpfile.

There is a content advisor but that is based on sites and content.

Control Panel does not manage IE..............there is a link to it, but IE is managed from within IE.

A password to access part of the control panel.....................not in Win98 IMHO

Does he have some sort of parental control software running, that has gone haywire? If so, boot into safe mode and delete it!

This behaviour does not match Win98 and IE..............something else is doing it, I am sure......either malware or third party software?

Cheers