Dallas wrote:

thanks again & only the word "internet" is in the status bar.

this is the site & error message I see

https://onlinebanking.vccuonline.net/html/Login.aspx

I just went to that web page. No error message about Javascript. I
clicked on the Login button. Got an error because I didn't enter any
login credentials. I just wanted to check if their Javascript worked on
that page. It did. So it must be the next web page that reports a
Javascript problem; however, I don't have an account there so I cannot
login to get to the next web page.

You could try adding their domain to the Trusted Sites security zone.
If that doesn't work, you'll have to contact them to report that IE8
cannot use their web site. They may be incorrectly detecting the web
browser connecting to them and screwing up on that detection. For
example, they may look for a range of UA (user agent) strings that web
browsers report to identify themselves but the UA string for IE8 is not
in their list.