It all started last night maybe as a result of me running a program that was mislabeled by norton as a trojan on my sister's computer. now every single computer on the network, excluding mine, is without internet access.

interestingly enough, you can still access google by using its IP instead of its domain name, but both IE and Firefox are affected as well as Outlook.

my computer does run different software [Zonealarm Pro, AVG, Ad-Aware and XP pro] whereas theirs run Zonealarm Free, Norton, and XP Home

any help would be great!

I was able to find the problem on the other computers. My computer automatically gets its IP and DNS server address, while their's are setup manually.

Once they were configured to automatic, their internet works. However, I believe that it has to be manual for sharing, correct?

You don't need static ip's for sharing. The whole sharing is usually done by computer name.

hmm thanks.

any ideas why the dns server ip would suddenly change?

Your ISP might have retired a DNS server, and just rotated a new one in with a new IP Address.

how nice of them to tell us lol