My parents use dial up but they have this 'surf accelerator' program that is supposed to speed up the internet by not downloading pictures at the full quality. There is an option to put certain websites on their to exclude them so you can get pictures in full resolution. It used to work ok, but now lately it doesn't matter if i put it in the exclusion list, it still makes the pictures look like crap. Is there a setting I might have off in internet explorer (please let me know if this makes any sense since I am probably not explaining it very well

First thing to try is clearing the cache. Once the degraded versions are loaded there, the browser won't try to reaquire the high quality versions.

I already did that.....are there any other programs out there that do the same thing?

Um, deinstall that surf accelerator P.O.S. ?