[QUOTE=J Matcham;742123]I am having similar problems to those outlined. I have tried everything I can think of to get IE back. First IE 7 stopped working and advice from India ended up with suggesting downloading the new version IE Beta 2 which doesn't work either. Have tried disabling add-ons...no good. I get the message check
HTTP port 80
HTTPS port 443
FTP port 2
HOW do I do that?!!!! I am an amateur at this.
I also looked at Firewall settings in Control box which looked perfectly normal (not xtra high)...
I hate to give up and call some-one expensive in. I suspect a Microsoft update because it had been perfectly alright. Any ideas?
Would very grateful. In simple language please.

I am getting the same error messages... What was the fix to this? I've already downloaded latest versions of IE and Firefox. If this is a firewall issue, how do I find that and fix it?
Thanks,
Bill

I tried hours and hours of others solutions...never worked!
Eventually by chance BT changed their protection from Symantec to McAfee and surprise surprised I got IE back so I suspect something very complicated and tangles re-firewalls...although I switched Symantec off to try that too... but BT took about three quarters of an hour changing the protection on my computer...with remote control SO I suspect that's where the problems lie...
BUT by that time I was happry with Firefox!!! serves them right!
Cheers...hope you get it fixed.

I'm not sure if anyone is still having this problem, but I just experienced it and after weeks of not finding any kind of solution I figured out what it was!

There are actually 2 possible solutions.

Try this first:

Go to Start, Control Panel, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, and then uncheck "Use a proxy server for your LAN" and hit "OK."

That should do it! But if you're like me and it was already unchecked, then this will probably fix it:

You need to completely uninstall Norton Internet Sercurity. Even if you think its uninstalled or expired...its probably not. To make completely sure its gone, go to http://www.neowin.net/news/software/...-tool-20080118

Make sure your product is on the list and download it! I had to download it from another computer and put it on a flashdrive in order to run it on my affected computer, but once I removed everything and restarted the laptop I was good to go!

I hope this helps!

You are, in fact, a genius no matter how you spell it. I lost my browser functionalities as well. Could not figure out why. Your option 2, to *completely* remove Norton AV software worked for me after many hours of diddling with firewall exceptions, trouble shooting, etc. Simply uninstalling Norton with Win XP obviously did not do it. My brand new netbook of course had Norton bloatware (disguised as helpful AV software) which was behaving annoyingly so I chose to uninstall it and opt for AVG; Norton is, in fact, almost as bad as being infected with a virus. And, based on this, just as hard to remove! So many hours wasted. But now I have a functioning Netbook. Thank you so much.

Check to see if you are trying to connect using a proxy.
Go to Tools/options/connections/lan settings.
if USE PROXY is checked un check it. Then hit APPLY.
If this worked please send me $10.00.
Thanks