Michael, I looked at Charter's site and unless you have two pieces of gear you only have the cable modem which is not a router (they have a package where you get a cable modem and a separate router).
To check which add-ons you have installed, in IE go to:
Tools -->
Manage Add-ons -->
Enable or Disable Add-ons.
Regarding updates, if you're not running Windows Update regularly or have auto-updates enabled, it would probably be a good idea to look into the advantages of doing so.
If you're married to IE, you might look at the
beta of IE8 - although that might open another can of worms if you haven't solved your IE7 issues.
I'd really advise that you try to get Firefox working. It's truly a great browser and it's the only browser I use on my Macs or my PCs.