Strange experience with IE

When I am working in my University... strange things have happened, one of the student wants to buy a laptop from Apple Educational store website. The default browser in all the machines in my University was Internet Explorer (IE) version 7 and the other available browsers in the machines are Firefox 3 and Netscape 7.

Student came to me saying that when he tries to open the Educational store page from Apple website, it diplayed a message saying that "Un-authorized access" (Cheked as well...). However, when I tried to open the same web page through Firefox 3, it works fine....

I couldn't understand what's wrong going on with IE........ I am wondering whether IE 7.0 is rubbish or the techi guys in my University didn't do proper setting? But what it says inside me is.......... IE is not up to the standard..............

It's not only the problem with Apple Educational store website opening page... but they are some other serious issues with IE... in my University they used Microsoft Sharepoint Server for all the staff-student interactions.. but even through it is the product from Microsoft it runs bad in IE.. sometimes, the web page never opens itself but it is exactly opposite with Firefox 3... which been working perfectly...