I am using IE7 and all the external site links in forums do not work. I dont know if this is a personal setting for me but I can only get links to work if I use Firefox.

Any Ideas?

I used IE7 and the forum worked fine... I uninstalled it because it had too many bugs though.
Anyway, this is definitely the wrong section of the forum for this post.

this is not a contest/sweepstakes related post :)

Take a look at this FAQ (http://forums.slickdeals.net/faq.php?faq=sd_faq_item#faq_sdlink_faq_item) and make sure you don't have any ad mulchers that would block it specifically assigned to IE.