-=> Mike Powell wrote to All <=-

 MP> A friend of mine has a laptop that runs Vista.

 MP> Recently, they have become unable to get web pages to load on their
 MP> machine.  They get a "connectivity error."  I had them
test a few other
 MP> things.  They are not able to get pages via IE or Firefox, and are not
 MP> able to telnet anywhere.

 MP> However, they can PING other "foreign" systems fine, and
they are able
 MP> to get updates via Windows update and (I think) Jave update.

 MP> They've tried the previous restore point, and it didn't help.

 MP> Any ideas??

 MP> Mike

If you can get to a command prompt, and ping google.com and you get a 
response, then your networking infrastructure works fine.  DNS works no 
problem.  However, if you open up firefox and you run into issues with 
connectivity, then there is no question about it that you've got something 
blocking your outbound HTTP traffic.  I've seen instances where firewalls 
become corrupted to the point where it won't let a web application talk on the
web for whatever reason.  The major culprit for that when I came across that 
issue was Norton (Anti)virus.  Their WORST rendition was NAV2004. {shiver}

Malware is suspect as well, so lets work through this;

1> What AV/FW software is running?  (AntiVirus/FireWall)
2> Have you run the regular tools such as HiJackThis!
3> Have you tried to remove the drive from the system, plugged it into another
computer and tried running an AV scan on the drive?


-- Steven Chranowski - telnet://thenoc.gotdns.com --

... Computer Hacker wanted. Must have own axe.
--- Renegade v1.18/Alpha