Hi Hershy -
As I recall, you finally wound up with a Canon EF 28-80mm zoom.
The reason that a conventional lens hood doesn't help very much on zooms is because the hood for this lens and other zooms has to be designed not to obstruct the edges of the image even when zoomed to the widest setting. Because of this, hoods on zoom lenses tend to be quite short and simply aren't very effective at keeping the sun from directly striking the front element of the lens.
In addition, the AR coatings, as well as the internal baffling on this particular lens are much less sophisticated than on more expensive Canon lenses. This means that once direct sunlight hits the front element, the game is lost -- the light will bounce around inside of lens, and with poor AR coatings and baffles, eventually wind up coming out the back of the lens and hit the sensor on your camera.
In principle, one can use their hand to shield the lens from direct rays from the sun, but, in practice if the sun is just at the edge of the field of view, this turns out to be very difficult unless you mount the camera on a tripod so you can watch the shadow of your hand hitting the front of the camera as you slightly adjust the position of your hand (without getting your hand in the image).
FYI, from:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/807513@N21/
"...The Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens is a very inexpensive normal zoom lens commonly included in Canon's film SLR kits.
Some refer to the Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens as a starter lens. As long as the person using the 28-80 knows its optical shortcomings, that designation may be fine. Otherwise, they may permanently be turned off by the performance of their SLR or Digital SLR.
The Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II Lens features a low build quality. It is very light - in weight, in quality and in price. ..."
Tom M