ok here is my issue. since this morning when i woke up i tried logging into msn messenger but i got the error about being behind a firewall. which i am not. i have gone through all my settings in IE and everything is fine. i figured it might be in the servers side... so i decided to just check my email and tryed to goto www.hotmail.com everytime i try to go to it i get redirected to some fastresults search thing that tells me it cannot find the hotmail website. until about an hour ago trying to go to just about any microsoft website would yeild the same results with the fastresults thing telling me it can't find it. everything was working fine at two in the morning when i shut my computer down. then at noon when i started it up again it started doing all this crap. i am useing road runner cable to connect and a dlink router with 4 computers. all of the computers do the same thing when trying to access hotmail or connect to msn messenger. i don't know if this is relevant but when i did shut it down last night it completely shut down for a couple of minutes and then started back up on its own somehow? thanks for reading my post. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks. i searched through older posts but didn't see any that could help me.

ah nevermind. i had been searching the web all day for some news about not being able to open microsoft websites and i just found all i need to know. thanks...

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/76624.html click links on responses 2 and 3. msn is experiencing technical difficulties today. and the first link just addresses roadrunner users or aol, it is a much wider problem.