MT4 Hangup - ibfx, sbfx not trading

For some reason neither IBFX nor SBFX will let me place any orders, instant or pending, on MT4 (ver. 4, 193). Anyone know what could be up with this??

My charts appear to be functioning normally.

When I go to the "Order" window the red sell button, the blue buy botton and the yellow bar below them are all faded out. I can still modify an existing pending order that I had placed last night.. but nothing new. Very weird! This is making me lean even farther away from MT4 platform...

any help is greatly appreciated

nate

ok, well I just restarted my system for the heck of it (no other noticeable problems) and now IBFX seems to be back to normal, but SBFX is still on the fritz.. so strange

Are you trading live or demo? If demo, get used to this. On live servers, this will rarely happen, in my experience. You can try another platform if you like, but, there are a lot of things that will affect performance of your client terminal, and most of them will not be because MT4 sucks.

The weird part to me is that you should be up to version 226 by now. And it is not uncommon for brokers to suspend trading if you are not using the current version.

I am going to assume that you are using Windows Vista or possibly Windows 7. I know for sure that Windows Vista will block the MT4 updates.

I think it would be a good idea to download the latest version from IBFX and your other broker. IBFX also has number of trade limits. I think it is 1000 trades which includes those in the strategy tester before you have to create new account or something.

im not sure Vista or Windows 7 or even MT4 v226 is available back in 2006