Unable to browse Web Sites

[Paul Starr]

My daughter purchased an HP Pavillion DV6000 notebook with Windows Vista Premium Home and IE 7.0 pre-installed. We set up a D-Link WEP so that she could share the DSL Internet connection. This worked well for several weeks. Recently though, IE will not display any web sites. Every URL responds with "Web site not found". I have run all the diagnostics and no errors are found. Other computers, wired and wireless that share the connection are able to browse just fine. The strange thing is that her MSN chat is working ok and I can ping the web sites like "www.google.com" and "www.dell.com" from the command line. I do not have very much experience with Vista or IE 7 so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[tomcv]

Since other PCs and their browsers work and you can ping domain names from the PC in question it seems likely something is amiss in IE7 on that PC.

Check that the IE7 proxy config is correct (probably disabled if this is a home networking environment).

[Paul Starr]

There is nothing a father won't do for his daughter. Last night I promised her I would get the problem fixed before the next day. I checked every setting that had to do with networking, TCP/IP, IPSEC, security settings etc. I swapped cards, reset the router, reconfigured the WEP and checked every Microsoft KB article that came up in my searches. Finally the obvious - what had changed between the time everything worked and the time the problem started? The only thing was the expiration of Norton AV trial. Ah ha...I turned off the Norton F/W and turned on the Vista firewall. It worked!!! Browser is back in full operation and daddy gets a big hug.

[Paul Starr]

Disable Norton AV firewall and enable Vista firewall.

[tomcv]

I don't use Norton / Symantec so I don't know if it's SOP for them to block Http when their licenses expire.
That's a pretty nasty behavior. Might persuade me to avoid that aisle when shopping for my next PC security suite.