Weird problem connecting to the internet

Supergrom

Ban Hammered
I'm helping some friends of mine capture all their old videos and edit them into dvds, and they have an HP media center PC (3 ghz p4, running XP media center edition) which at some point had its DVD burning software deleted. So we used the revert hard drive partition to reinstall all the factory loaded software (OS included, ugh) and all was more or less fine and dandy for a few hours maybe, but then the internet stopped working on the machine I was working on.

They have 2 computers connected to a DSL line through a Linksys wired and wireless router. the HP machine i was working on is wired, and the other, which had no problem accessing the internet is using the wireless. I messed around with the network settings for a good while, to no avail, and decided to test the connection in a command prompt. I was able to ping the router, the gateway, the DNS server, my own home IP address, and even google.com (set as the browsers' start pages [both IE and firefox]) but the webrowsers still gave generic "unable to connect" errors.

I thought it might be a virus or malware problem, so i proceeded to go about cleaning up that kind of thing, and noticed that the computer would go on the internet while in network enabled safe mode. I ran antivir, adaware, and spybot, but still had problems so i followed this other extensive tutorial that seemed to clean just about everything up. The computer runs a lot better now, but it still won't access the internet unless its in safe mode.

Any ideas on what might still be wrong? Do you think they still have some malware/virus? or is there some setting not set right when it boots normally for some reason? thanks for any help.
 
Hmm I dunno, maybe the Linksys isn't doing NAT correctly? Did you try rebooting the router? I would do that before anything else. Other than that, try doing some other stuff from the command prompt, like telnet or ftp. It may be that just port 80 isn't getting through for some reason. Also, does the problem persist even w/the other machine turned off?
 
Originally posted by Supergrom

the webrowsers still gave generic "unable to connect" errors
IE is the only browser I know of that uses a catchall error for "unable to connect". What is the specific error message that Firefox gives?
 
I would also recommend resetting both your router and cable/dsl whatever you have.
 
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