Possibly your problem is that you are using IE 8. I think that there are newer versions of IE even for XP.
Anssi
Nope - IE8 was as far as XP goes. XP isn’t supported by Microsoft or anyone else.
You’re only limited by a little inconvenience: go to a browser and get what you need. If you can’t log in, get another browser. No one’s going to spend much energy on XP these days. I do have a VirtualBox-version of NeXTSTEP running, and Tim Berners-Lee’s original web browser doesn’t work all that well anymore, either.
The main thing I wanted to do was have my plugins automatically update. If I can’t log on to sketchup.com through SU 2014, that isn’t going to happen. So I guess I’ll have to copy the auto-updated plugins from SU 2013 to SU 2014? Are there any “gotchas” to that approach?
Yes with SU2014 the Ruby interpreter was upgraded to 2.0, so many extensions need to be tweaked to conform to Ruby language syntax changes.