When visiting sites such as Yahoo!'s most emailed content site - http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/mt/?u - all the links have referrers, eg they look like:
I always get “Cannot find page” and have to delete everything up to the asterisk * for the link to work.
Why is this? I’m using IE on Windows ME.
I don’t know if you are still having this problem… but I was having the same problem and did a search for your OP.
The reason is was happening to me is because rd.yahoo.com was pointing to 127.0.0.1.
Are you using some kind of ad-blocker? If so, that is why this is happening.
To fix it, open up c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in Notepad and search for rd.yahoo.com. Then just take out the entire line where that is mentioned and save.
Then close and reopen your browser. Voila! 
I am not on my work pc now, but I will try to do this tomorrow. I was using pop-up stopper, I don’t know if that was interfering with it. I will try what you say and post back on the results. Thanks very much for the info!