Hallelujah!! I had this problem for 2 wks. I believe it was spy/malware related as it first occurred after AdAware performed a scan and notified me that I had to reboot to remove one of the problems. Upon restart, Spybot ran a scan and low and behold, no programs could access the internet. Neither Firefox or IE nor any programs that look for updates like (ironically?) AdAware and Spybot. No instant messaging either. I knew I did not have an issue with my provider since my Vonage phone still worked and my daughter's computer in the other room still worked. I checked to confirm and was able to successfully ping yahoo and google from a command window on the troubled PC. After trying to back out the last changes from AdAware/Spybot and some basic troubleshooting (really just an ipconfig stop/start and checking the hosts file) I started surfing for others with this problem. I found that there were *many* people that had encountered the same problem so started taking notes of things to try. While there may be different causes, the fix that worked for me was to reset the Winsock. I ran the command above and it notified me that I needed to reboot to complete the reset. When my PC came back up viola, I was online again. Thanks very much to everyone that posts to this board and others!!!! mike
