does this have anything to do with why windower 4.2 (iir) on my other xp comp suddenly stopped working?
Not directly, as far as I know. However, Windower updates (and those addons, plugins, etc.) do not work correctly on Windows XP due to a problem with XP's SSL stack. This is not a new issue though, so I'd be surprised if you only ran into it recently, unless you just haven't used that install in a very long time.