I understand Syria, Iran and China (to name a few) have blocked facebook. It would seem that a government run agency(?) may have only built blocking software for the latest versions of a Microsoft product (Vista in your case). This unwanted "software" would have been deployed via connection to your ISP. The fact you can circumvent such blocks imposed on a Vista machine by using an earlier version of Windows demonstrates this to be the case.

A proxy server is good and works in your case. I would use several Proxies to make a trace less likely to your IP address and do that in conjunction with limiting time accessed to a government forbidden site such as Facebook.

Your "wife's (brand new state of the art) laptop" will either need to run an earlier version of Windows (with proper drivers manually installed), use a Linux operating system on a partitioned section of your laptop hard-drive to access the internet, or you can try using your mobile phone to satisfy the facebook junky (expensive).

I offered the above knowing that freedom is indeed and important word.

Perceived freedom my friend. We Aussies are slowly being 'filtered' and ultimately blocked if our government has it's ways. They are pushing to 'filter' such as ch!ld p*rn and the like. Those involved will always have their ways. But this i believe is only the beginning.

The Net aint what it used to be.

You got the country right in three. I am not a fan of Facebook and normally it would not worry me not having access, but it is a way to stay in touch with what the kids are up to when you are on three different continents.

Thanks to you and the others for you assistance - I will try and let you know what success or otherwise I have with your suggestions.

Cunning people out there - decided to try some of the ideas from this thread last night and "they" have caught up with me on the proxy server so now even my old system does not work properly. How sad.

You can try running the program in compatability mode for XP SP2 or install XP into the Vista O/S.

Have you tried using Firefox or Chrome on your wife's computer? Don't know that it will work, but I have gotten different results by trying different browsers.

Fire up virtualbox and install your old copy of windows on a virtual machine and enjoy some not-so-technologically-advanced-and-annoying browsing! If you save a snapshop of your virtual machine you don't even really have to worry much about the security vulnerability (modern viruses on an old machine = malware/virus/trojan/worm feeding frenzy) ...just browse away and restore the snapshot when you're done to put it all back the way it was.