After weeks of attempting to find the solution to this problem, which should have been resolved by a tech person I hired, I woke this morning at 3:00 a.m. and attacked the pdf download restriction from a different angle.  Unlike the other posts in the community, which I appreciated, it was not a matter of adjusting internet explorer settings. I played with that possibility for a few days.  It turned out that I was missing a program; Adobe Reader!  I downloaded it, restarted my computer and I was able to open the pdf files from my e-mail program.  Fireberd, thank you for your contact.  I am posting this solution for my particular issue for others to consider.  As I think about it, the pc language is complicated and geared towards people with a certain level of knowledge.  People like me are easily intimidated by obtuse terms regularly employed by the people who bring us these wonderful machines.  I am reminded that computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but that is not the result of our technology improvements.  Instead, computers are making our lives easier and more complicated at the same time which was never an intended twin objective at the beginning of the technology revolution.  To the PC people, stop practicing computer alchemy. write in plain english.  We all can enable terms of art that make things much more complicated than necessary.  I can, for example, write certain phrases in Latin, but it is not necessary for me to make things more complicated for the lay person.  Perhaps that will be the next horizon.  Thank you Fireberd.  
Message when downloading on Windows Vista OS:  "your current security settings do not allown for this file to be opened"   How do I correct this problem to allow for file downloads?  Thanks  
security settings