I have XP home edition sp2, a few months ago my firewall stop me getting on the net, I eventually solved this I am now using mozilla firefox but the explorer still doesn't work it says cannot find page also can't go to hotmail/messenger but outlook express still works.I am using an external cable modem [broadband]. I have been reading the threads and on one of them was the numbers for the web page instead of the www. address I tried this on the explorer and the pages came up please tell me it means there is a simple solution because I am a novice and when I look on microsoft site for help there was nothing simple! :o .
juli

The "numbers" for the web pages are their IP addresses. If you can reach a site by its IP address but not by its URL (the "www." address), that usually indicates a problem with your DNS settings.

DNS is the method computers use to associate a site's URL with the correct IP address. All sites on the Internet are really identified by IP address and not their URL, so if DNS can't translate the "www.whatever.com" name into the right numeric IP address, your browser won't know what site it's supposed to contact.

Try to repair Internet Exploder with the free IEFix utility program; it might correct the problem. If it doesn't work there are other things to try, but they're a bit more technical, so run IEFix first and let us know what happens.

Thank you it took me a day but the IEFIX helped and now everything is working again.
regards juli

Glad it worked for you.