IE7 Advanced tab 'blank'

Running XP with SP2 and IE 7 and Mozilla. Just spent a painful few days getting rid of a virus that a member of family managed to infect the PC with despite spware and antivirus protections....virtumonde variant I believe...

Anyway was having each member of the family check how things were now working and my daughter said she couldn't download new flash. So I tried to run the flash and shockwave uninstallers/installers via IE 7 but couldn't get by the ACtiveX controls. When I tried to add Adobe as a trusted site and check the ability to run ActiveX I found I couldn't see anything on the Tools-->Internet Options-->Advanced tab...nada, nothing, all blank instead of the various list of check boxes. Very strange. IE 7 working fine under other user accounts, but not mine (I have admin rights on the system). So I did my thing with Mozilla just fine and got everything installed.

Went back to IE7 and couldn't get stuff to go so I decided to reset the settings.IE7 then went into a 4-page setup mode asking whether I wanted to keep my previous search engine and so on...hit the save settings and nothing.
I googled some sites which suggested writing a HKCU\Software\MS\IE\Main RunONceCompleted key set to 1 and that got IE7 from hanging but the advance tab is still blank and I can't configure Security tab's custom either.

Sounds like a screwup rather than permissions since I can admin things.

Anyone with any idea? I can use Firefox until then but what am I missing?
PS --due to the other troubles, I can't restore since I turned off that feature to prevent the virus from reinfecting stuff.

thanks for your help

 

Thanks for everyone's suggestions, but none of them resolve the issue.

 

IE 7 Restoration Successful

Thanks to PeteC. I was not able to restore IE7's functionality--Tool Advanced Options screen reappearing or other security options--with any other half measures, like IE Fix, registry hacking IE or any other of the suggestions--not to sound unappreciative.

PeteC's suggestion to uinstall IE7 (it didn't show up in the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs) so I went into the system Restore mode ( I did have XP SP2) and by running batch supuninst.txt from the XP system disk's ie7\spuninst folder and then rebooting, downloading IE7 and all its updates from the microsoft.com windows download web site for IE7--and rebooting--everything seems to be good.

Thnaks