I'm having a similar problem at my univeristy. I decided to reformat my computer due to unrelated reasons. Yet once everything was back up, since my computer was essentially open to the elements, some worms were placed on my computer which could only be from being connected to the college network. Well i ran anti-virus.. did a spyware and adware search and cleaned it all off.. This resolved a good amount of my problems. Now I did a lot of the windows updates.. upon doing sp1 and a bunch of others I get the issue where after 15-30 min I can no longer go to websites. Now i'll still be connected to AIM and the apache server I have on my comp will still be running fine.

I then installed sp2 and the problem is worse.. within seconds I can't get onto websites. Now my computer has been loading stuff on startup extremely slowly. Also whenever I open the first instance of IE it will start to load my homepage then go to a different website I can't remember the exact address (i'm on my home computer) but i know it's a long complicated word with an A and the html file is named medi.html. I looked up this website and couldn't find anything about it being harmful.

I'll try the suggested things when I get back to school.. but this is quite an annoying problem.. i'm pretty good with computers and have tried various things but am not sure how this can be resolved. Anyone else have new ideas?

Oh yeah.. and i'm connecting through the cable network.