IE8 IE7 do not have TABS. Why?

anyone dealt with this before?
I've repaired and refurbed MANY windows PC's and never seen this.
I on a rebuild I checked IE8 via windows updates, along with a few other security patches etc. I noticed when IE8 was installing, the onscreen progress indicator got stuck in a loop saying 'installing" or one of those messages, and it never blinked for like 40 minutes. I finally had to force it closed.
to my surprise, on a reboot, IE8 was "installed" but in using it, I noticed it had no Tab item on the context menu and no tab 'button' onscreen. tried to fix and could not, so I uninstalled it altogether and downloaded the whole IE7 install package.
Ran the install, it worked fine, but when I used it, no tabs.

When I go to internet settings, General, there is no tab setting applet. it doesn't exist.

there are a LOT of posts in forums on this issue in both ie7 and ie8 but the 'advice' given usually results in the thread going zombie... never resolved. in fact I've yet to find one that truly looks like it was 'fixed', which is why I am posting.

clues?

otherwise, IE7 works great... way faster than the other IE's

EDIT: one more mystery: I have, and have had, no IE-No-Addons in the System Tools Menu.

I would love to know the technical 'why' behind all this, but here's what came to mind and I sorta proved it out...
The original install was what the COA on the machine calls for: MCE 2005. Tried to load that but it went like most if not all disc-based MCE installs - botched. It was limping when finally booted. I installed [re?] network services using WinXP SP3 disc, got rolling, updated as much as I could and was pretty coherent. It was after installing IE8 via Win Updates that the problem occurred: BUT, the minute I first had network access, I had installed Chrome [its installer is pretty tenacious] - worked well but I wondered if doing that had altered something about the User Acct that made trouble for IE7 and IE8.

So last night created a fresh new user acct with Admin privileges, logged on, and once again installed IE8. It had bugs, but it worked - tabs & all. for some reason there are pieces of IE loaded in Program Files folder, but the bulk is in \Windows\ie8

If you can explain the underlying 'why' of this I would be most happily a student....

Sorry but I'm a bit confused? What OS were you installing IE8 on?

zapp22 said:

I on a rebuild I checked IE8 via windows updates, along with a few other security patches etc. I noticed when IE8 was installing, the onscreen progress indicator got stuck in a loop saying 'installing" or one of those messages, and it never blinked for like 40 minutes.....

.....so I uninstalled it altogether and downloaded the whole IE7 install package.
Ran the install, it worked fine, but when I used it, no tabs.

zapp22 said:

I installed [re?] network services using WinXP SP3 disc, got rolling, updated as much as I could and was pretty coherent. It was after installing IE8 via Win Updates that the problem occurred...

Are we talking XP or Windows 7?

If we're taliking Windows 7, sorry but IE8 is native to Windows 7 - meaning it's automatically included/incorporated with the OS.

Sorry if I've misunderstood

BTW.....