My computer is neither 98 nor millennium edition and I was very leery of downloading fixes, but I did find a solution so I want to reply to this thread in order to help others that may have a similar problem.

I had uninstalled and reinstalled firefox to fix an unrelated problem. At the time of uninstall FF had been set to my default browswer and that's what screwed the hyperlinks up. All I did to fix it was temporarily set IE as the default browser and that got rid of the error. When I reset FF as the default again, the problem stayed fixed.

thanks for your help though.