I have not been able to access Microsofts home page or their windows update page. I use zonealarm firewall and Nortons anti virus. I tried shutting off the firewall and rebooting. When I access the site I get page cannot be displayed. I tried to ping the sites, there was no responce. What other setting could be causing the problem, I have no other issues with the internet.

Try adding http://*.microsoft.com to your Trusted sites zone under Internet Options>> Security in Internet Explorer and then try the page again.Goodluck

I've done that under trusted sites as www.microsoft.com. It doesn't help. If the address starts as for example, support.microsoft.com, it works, (of course there's no support) but not when the address starts with "microsoft". Also I can't access windows update page either.

I spent hours and hours on this - my problem was related to the winsock2 registry being corrupt. My symptom was that I could not browse www.microsoft.com only - ebay would act funky - everything else fine. found this tool: http://members.shaw.ca/techcd/WinsockXPFix.exe IT WORKED for me. Resets TCP/IP stack flushes dns, updates hosts file, and repairs xp winsock2 registry settings. Virus free according to PCcillin Hope this helps.