Well, I don't have enough tech savvy to absolutely say how this has happened, but can now provide further info as to what is happening...

When my hubby got home, I was telling him about this oddity, so being on the same lan he fired up his system, went to rendo to the poll and he could see the question, that told us it wasn't a local network problem, but he is using the exact same browser on windows xp,  so he pulled up the source code for the page on both his machine and on mine.  The entire .poll html section is missing from the source code under my Vista system but is there and displays under his xp system when viewed with both of us using FF3.6.8.

If it was only happening in FF, I might have thought it was a browser specific error, but since it affects IE as well, I wound up back at the OS.  Since my daughter's computer uses Win7, my husband went to check there and sure enough no poll, the same .poll section is missing when she views the page on that OS.

The only guess right now that makes sense is that the page coding is somehow not compliant with the current versions of .net framework.  As my husband, who doesn't do graphics, runs xp with .net framework 2, my daughter, who does some and has the newest OS is running .net framework 3.5 and my computer, is actually running all versions through .net framework 4.0 with all the attendant patches to accommodate the variety of graphics programs I use.

Short summary, for those of us not seeing it, the html code that puts it on the page is completely absent.