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I'm trying to sort out a problem with my parents' PC which has so far got me stumped. Internet Explorer is giving a standard "page cannot be displayed" error, as is Firefox.
However Outlook works fine, as do pings (both to IPs and URLs so it's obviously getting DNS alright). It's not the router as I'm browsing fine from other PCs on the network. I thought it might be the software firewall (recently updated) but the same problem occurs when that's turned off.
Any suggestions for other things I can try before I tear my hair out? The PC itself is a fairly old Windows 2000 machine but was working fine before and has all the latest Windows and AV updates.
Is there a 'Diagnose Networking Problems' button? Sure you would have tried it if there were...
IE version?
from what you say dns is ok if you can ping names so i would hazard a guess you are going through some proxy, intentianly or not, some anti virus programs and firewalls mess with these settings, as do some spyware, addware anti p2p programs, blocking port 80
I think it might be the Flux Capacitor.
eliminate the browsers by trying to connect from the command line. Open up a command window and type 'telnet bbc.co.uk 80', if you get a response then standard http traffic is being permitted out and the browser settings are most likely going to be the issue. As dobo says, you may be inadvertantly pointing at a proxy or the browser may be trying to activate a specific network connection when it's opened.
Yup, I've had this, I tried for ages to try and solve. In the end I used it as an excuse to reinstall windows from scratch..
Ta for help so far. Telnet gives an error (Connection to host lost) so looks like it's not just the browser. How would I tell if it's using a proxy?
Managed to sort it at last - I disabled the "linkscanner" component of the antivirus (AVG 8.5), and suddenly everything was back to normal. Looks like it's back to good old Avast for antivirus.