I'm not sure what the problem is here. I received a laptop from a friend asking me to fix it. The laptop cannot get online. It gets an IP address from the router and can ping all over the web as well as resolve domain names, but it can do nothing else Internet related. Cannot browse the web. Internet Explorer gives a "page cannot be displayed" error. I installed the latest version of IE, AVG, and Service Pack 2. Reset Winsock and TCP/IP with the netsh command, and downloaded virus definitions to a thumb drive so I could update AVG. A virus scan comes up clean. I tried manually adding IE to the windows firewall, no soap. I disabled the firewall from the Windows Services, still no web. I thought of trying Firefox to see if it was an IE problem, but the thing is, even though I could ping from the command prompt, I couldn't telnet to anyplace on port 80. I even tried a few web sites on alternate ports, to see if something was blocking the standard HTTP port. IE, Windows update, AVG update, yahoo messenger, none of these programs can access the web. Anyone encountered a problem like this before? Is it malware that AVG isn't picking up? It's driving me nuts!

Ok, I found the problem. Even though it had been uninstalled, there were traces of Norton on this system and they had suddenly become corrupt. This was an acer computer, and I noticed in the welcome screen an offer for Norton 360. So I decided to try the Norton Removal Tool to get rid of all traces of it. That solved the problem. It's no wonder I hate their home-use products. Something got hosed, and it created a ton of problems.