Does your firewall remove your browser's "user-agent" header? -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
After much tweaking of settings with Norton's and Windows XP firewalls I was able to gain access to wikipedia sites... it seems my computer has been the target of buffer overflow attacks according to the logs, which were blocked by Norton's Firewall... the program went on the defense sutting down privacy/information access... From Brion's explanation of cookies with Safari I figured I'd take a look at the cookies settings in Norton's and sure enough it was denying cookies... I set it back to eating these forbidden treats and it seems now to access the wikipedia ok... (And eventhough I use XP at home, mostly, I also have a Linux-Mandrake box I use from time to time, I do use Safari at work, on an iMac with OS X, one of the 8 computers in my classroom, I will pass on the message about insecure cookies to the other teachers who also use it at the three schools I work in, they're Mac inundated, although most of them are older iMacs using OS 9, the newer eMacs all come with OS X).
Ok, enough of my jubilant chat for now, thanks Brion for the suggestions, and for the patience of those on Wikitech-l.
Cheers! Jay B.