Link in mail message goes wrong

I have 2 pcs on a home network, this one is vista ultimate sp1, windows mail, internet explorer 8. The other one is XP sp3,outlook express, IE 6.
A few days ago I received an email containing a link to a photo gallery displaying some family photos which worked perfectly in the XP machine but displayed a completely different set of photographs when opened in the Vista machine.
Due to privacey issues for the sender I don't want to publish the actual link but it was in the form - http://gallery.me.com/aaaaaaaaaaaa#nnnnnn&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=4

where I assume aaaaaaaaaaaa is a username and nnnnnn is some sort of password identifying the gallery subscriber.

I noticed that the link passed into the address bar of IE8 had been truncated just before the # character following the username and that if the missing information was typed in and the page refreshed the correct photos were displayed.
From this I concluded that whatever code is used to lift the web address from the mail message is terminating the address at the hash character.
Has anyone else come across this effect on this or any other web link?

I've done all the default program things as recomended in other similar posts and nothing changes.