I started my machine yesterday morning and discovered I could not browse. I have a broadband connection. I use both IE6 and Firefox and have not had problems before. I tried to ping www.yahoo.com www.google.com and recieved replies from them. My Connection settings -> LAN on IE internet options are fine ( Proxy not checked, Detect Automatic settings unchecked, all unchecked). I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox and no success. I carried out repair of IE from System tools and that did not help too. The only thing I remember doing before that was I uninstalled a download manager after trial period (Cocsoft). I got the "updating setup" message when starting win98 yesterday morning. Let me know if you need more info. Any help will be appreciated.

if you can ping by names, then TCP/IP and DNS are working. Can you get e-mail from a POP3 account? (e.g. you use Outlook Express with an e-mail account from your ISP?) If other Internet apps are working, then there's something blocking HTTP traffic. at a command prompt type: netstat -s and look for TCP statistics, packets sent, packets received. Sometimes your ISP will be having problems and if you try again later, you can access all webpages. If you really suspect the download manager uninstall, then do a system restore. "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - BILL CLINTON

Retroguy: Thank you for the response. I am at office. Problem is with my home pc, I'll try this today. I have not connected to my mail server with POP3, perhaps I'll try that. My WMP and Realplayer also cannot open files with http:// and rtsp://. What is system restore? Is it complete reinstall of my OS ? Thanks

No my POP3 also does not work. So it looks like some basic socket issue. So for now it looks like except PING, I have no other way to connect to the net. Any suggestions on how to resolve this? Thanks in advance.

I have RESOLVED it !! I think Winsockfix should be able to do the work, but I had no means of getting the software to my machine. So in my usual searches got to the following page. http://www.cexx.org/winsock.htm Going by the instructions, here is what I did: 1) opened regedit 2) clicked to HKEYLOCALMACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services 3) renamed WinSock2 folder to OldWinsock2. 4) closed regedit and restarted windows. 5) deleted all network drivers and restarted machine. This reinstalled my network drivers. 6) restarted machine, and reconfigured my TCP/IP. 7) restarted machine, opened IE and back to the browsing. For a person not confident of using the above, winsockfix should be able to help. Cheers !

Thanks a lot for posting the fix! Glad it worked out. "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - BILL CLINTON