I have a dual boot W2k-Sp4 and XP home-sp1 pc linked to a Zyxel 660 HW Prestige router with a cable connection. For the past 24 hours, I have difficulty accessing the Web through either Firefox or Internet Explorer under the w2k system. When I open Firefox, it hangs on www.google.com. If I specify another URL in the address box, I manage to reach it after a long while. When I ping those URLs, the operation is successful in every case! Mailwasher and Incredimail do not react either although I have mail in my provider?s mailbox. I stopped the firewall to no avail. I scanned the disk with antivirus and anti-spyware programs. The odd thing now is that I have no problem at all with the same pc running under XP. No problem either with 2 laptops connected to the same router via pcmcia cards (one runs under w2k-sp4 and the other under xp home-sp1).

Put the IP address in the URL box instead of the domain name. Does it take as long to load? My first guess is a DNS configuration problem.

How do I obtain the IP address corresponding to the domain? In Mailwasher (an anti-spam pgm), whenever I force a mail check, it tells me that "the session was closed by the Server before the session was completed". I'll check this out with ISP on Friday. If I had a bad Username or password, it would have let me know.

Open a command prompt and run tracert google.com press enter. You'll see the IP. That's just one of a number of ways.

Problem solved. The culprit was Avast. When i disabled the Web shield in Resident Protection, everything worked fine. However, in order to access my mailbox, I have to disable Avast completely (I'm using version 4.7.892)! Thanks for your help.

As I suspected, it was an Avast problem after all. I haven't changed anything with my W2k-SP4 since, but for the past few days, I don't need to deactivate Avast any longer in order to use Incredimail or Firefox. An Avast update must have fixed what was wrong.