I have two laptops here that will not connect to websites. I punch an address in the address bar and I get a cannot connect page.

One both I have disabled firewalls, antivirus, antispy programs. I have reset the IP stack, flushed DNS, etc. I have reset IE back to default, I have even cleaned the registry(644 errors) and all to no avail. One laptop is formatting now since there was nothing on it to backup, but the other is full and formatting is only a last resort.

The funny thing is that if I use the command line to ping a website, I get a response back with the IP address. I am baffled here......Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

when did this start happening? what happened previous? are you connecting through a router? do others have access to this pc? have you checked thesecurity settings are disabled inside ie/firefox - not someone playing a prank on you by denying all access to all websites? are you inside a network?

Not sure when it started happening but I was told there was a trojan that was removed and it started after that.

Security settings are fine within the browsers and the pcs are connected to the network with an ISP supplied Router/NAT.

There is no chance that it is just someone playing a prank as both pcs came from different houses.

Hope this helps

How about uninstalling and reinstalling just the browser? rather than a reformat... some trojans are particularly nasty and make changes to the browser/other applicaition so that it doesn't work if they are removed, they overwrite and replace themselves over a critical process, and when you delete them, that process is no longer there. thus you are connected, but unable to display. if you got the virus causing the problem then reinstall the application. (back up your bookmarks and history and passwords first.)

You may want to note that if you are on a proxy server or on a Virtual Private Network and sometimes if you are on a Local Area Network then you will need to configure those settings into your web browsers. So in Internet Explorer, open the Options window then click the connections tab and configure with the appropriate options and buttons what they should be.

Thanks for all the input, I have found the problem. The trojan in both these cases made changes to the browser settings. I discovered that instead of being set to No Proxy both Fixefox and IE were manually configured to connect through a proxy IP address. In both browsers the proxy was set to a loopback IP 127.0.0.1
I removed the proxy and immediately it worked.
Thanks again