I've been experiencing a weird problem recently. Every now and then, I'm unable to browse any websites (both IE and Firefox). It appears as though the internet connection isn't working, but a 'ping' of any website works fine. Other connections such as live music stream and messenger programs remain intact as well... When this happens, IE and Firefox act as though there isnt an internet service, and I can't browse any websites for 1 or 2 minutes, and then it's back to normal. It's also happened that i sometimes can't browse certain websites for a few minutes and it gets back to normal again (I'm sure the websites were not down, ie, amazon.com, msn.com... these don't go down often!) Any suggestion what on earth might be going on?

Also if it might help, I'm on wireless G, and use a linksys WRT54G router

okay i tried to pay more attention. The problem seems random -in one case, a ping of any website i could think of failed (again popular ones that wouldn't go offline), while a ping of computing.net was working fine is this possibly the router messing up its dns cache?

google for 'smurf attacks. that rogue software has nailed 2 routers for me. nasty stuff

Hrmmm...not sure about it, but if you are getting picked up and dropped at random times and for seemingly all websites, I'd guess the wireless signal is bad. Can you go with a wired connection? What about running an anti-spyware program? That might help. What signal strength does the OS report from the router? Maybe move the router closer to the PC? I'd also check the web for your type of router and see if anyone else has reported similair problems. A young boy puts a feather into his mouth...

hi, thanks for the replies. I don't think it can be a wireless issue, because at the instant the problem occurs, non-HTTP internet programs continue to work, and i can still browse my router's web tool. Sometimes I'm able to continue to visit recently visited websites, while any other website would simply fail to load. I have NOD32 running all the time, but I'll try to get something else to do a spyware check as well "mountain", could you be a bit more specific about the smurf attacks you mentioned? any specific spyware known to do that?

It could be that something flaky is going on with port 80 (Http) inside the router. It's possible there may be a DNS issue somewhere. You can also use tracert utility from the command prompt to try and locate the disconnection. Did you try pinging by ip address and then by name to see if you got the same response? Try pinging the DNS server when this happens. Check the routers website and see if any firmware fixes are available. I would also try switching the cable to another port and lastly swapping the router out.