Actually, that sounds like the problem right there.
Two things you should check: are these sites (photobucket, deviantart) "safe" or did they find their way into your block-list somehow? I had trouble of a similar nature with some other sites, and it turns out that somewhere along the line I'd denied them a cookie and IE added [all] cookies from that site to a blocker.
Second thing, make sure that any peripheral blockers (things to kill adware/spyware, virus protection, etc) aren't wiping the slate clean on you. As an example, AdAware used to reset my registry any time I changed my home-page, essentially locking it to whatever site I'd called "home" before installing it.
