I have recently had a reconfiguration on my computer that makes it impossible for me to visit popular websites including yahoo.com, microsoft.com etc.... I have no clue how to undo this.
For instance when I type in www.yahoo.com i am redirected to www.www.yahoo.com.org/
and i type www.microsoft.com i am redirected to www.www.microsoft.com.org- suprise suprise the same website.
I have tried system restore, the latest virus scanners, trojan scanners, The only thing I can think of was I had installed an applet from www.instantchess.com and it added some weird things to my explorer task bar. I have since removed this and any other programs that don't look familiar but to no avail. I have noticed that msn messenger & yahoo messenger no longer log in. I have windows xp and have tried different accounts.
One other thing the gateway machine was partially affected but only on one user account the rest are all fine I have deleted the affected user account on that machine and tried using nslookup to get the name of the local DNS. my machine will use this for DNS lookup with the exception of microsoft, yahoo which it appears to dig from thin air.

I know this problem is more complicated than one would normaly ask but I don't want to have to re-install. Their are 3 other puters on my home network that are all working correctly wich makes me think its just my machine.
I get these problems with all applications that access popular sites. including I.E. netscape, msn messenger, yahoo messenger, outlook express. so it must be just a DNS problem but I have no clue

It's possible that your hosts file is messed up.

Look in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\etc\HOSTS if you have Win2K/WinXP or C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS for ME/98.

There was a virus going around that would change your hosts file for popular sites, such as those.

thanks tyler for responding. I have jsut this second managed to resolve this issue. I earlier narrowed it down to a dns resolver cache on the gateway machine that had stored invalid addresses. I tried purging it along with arp-a then renewing the adapters this has just done the trick yahoo is back along with msn. I assume the rest will fall back into place. still dunno what inserted those rogue entries there though.

hey sennetor. i read ur solution and still dont understand it realy.

could you please explain what exactly you did???

Hi wdyu2002, Windows XP has its own lookup table for resolving DNS names. Every time I access a web address XP goes to the ISP's DNS & gets the equivalent IP address for that site...then XP stores that IP in its own little cache to speed up DNS lookups. XP for some unknown reason had this cache rewritten so that it contained a rogue site forcing me to be redirected to it every time I wanted a popular website.
I managed to clear the arp cache by typing arp -a at the command prompt in safe mode along with the DNS cache(the 2 are similar I forget how to clear the DNS cache mabye i used "ipconfig /flushdns" at the command prompt. Sorry about the delay in responding I kinda neglected the boards for a while.