My brother is trying to get on the LAN at his new small college (who are apparently running LINKSYS routers), and he has perfect 11 Mbps connectivity off of two "public" connections according to Network Connections.

However, when he opens IE7 he has about 30 seconds to a minute (during which he can actually browse) before IE freezes completely and he cannot close out of it. He is able to move the mouse but it also triggers other processes to freeze or slow down, and eventually it requires a restart.

When he tries Firefox, the browser does not crash or freeze but it will not connect to the Internet, and just displays whatever page it would display as if there were no connection at all. I had him uninstall Firefox but he cannot stay on IE long enough to redownload another copy of Firefox.

I thought maybe it was a browser problem but BEFORE *AND* AFTER his failure to get on the LAN, he has successfully connected to Firefox (but he didn't try IE) with no problems on a WIRELESS connection.

He is on Vista and most others are on XP still, but nobody else is having any troubles either on the LAN or on Wireless. Any suggestions? He is pretty desperate as you can imagine now that the school year is started and he is without the most convenient research tool available to college students.

he is without the most convenient research tool available to college students.
The library? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

From the Command Prompt, see if he can't ping www.google.com. If he can, have him type in the following:
cd /d %UserProfile%\desktop
ftp ftp.mozilla.org
anonymous
<his email here>
cd /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.6/win32/en-US
get "Firefox Setup 2.0.0.6.exe"
quit

If all went well, he should now have the Firefox setup program on his desktop. Then again, I'm using WinXP, so it might not work the same on Vista.

Thanks--although I very carefully used "convenient" rather than "reliable"... :)

I will have him try that; it will get me Firefox, though it seems that the problem was not limited to Firefox anyway so, while that will give us the program, it won't necessarily address the root of a problem. Anybody else?

This is sorta one step at a time deal, here. If he can ping Google, then we know it's a browser problem. Both browsers have issues with their installers (granted, IE7 comes with Vista, but I'm not ruling out a patching error), which lead to a host of interesting problems.

Had you come back with, "I can't ping Google," I'd suggest checking your Internet settings, and making sure Automatically Detect Settings and/or Automatic Config Script (or whatever they call them in Vista) isn't used.