www.msnbc.com has been my home page for years now, but only since Thursday, 12 Oct 06, I have always gotten the "page cannot be displayed" screen with "Cannot find server or DNS error" at the bottom. It may be only a coincidence that I downloaded and installed Microsoft's critical Windows updates for October at about the same time this problem first occurred.

I tried to access msnbc not just from the default at IE startup, but also by searching google and clicking the links found there and also by typing the URL in the address bar of IE. I also looked up the IP address of msnbc.com at http://www.hcidata.info/host2ip.cgi and then tried entering http://207.46.150.20 and http://207/46/150/20 in the IE address bar. I got the same result "Cannot find server or DNS error"/

I am running Windows XP with 1.256 gigs of RAM and all other web sites come right up (with the notable exception of www.ssa.gov, which has given me the same error for months now). I am also running Norton Internet Security including firewall and anti-virus and Webroot Spysweeper, but they always report 0 viruses, 0 spyware.

If anyone has an idea how to solve my problem, I will greatly appreciate your help.

Let's try this.

Download Hoster and run the program, allowing it to reset the Hosts file.

What this does is replace the Hosts file, which can oftentimes become corrupted, therefore limiting the access to certain sites.

Thanks.

Thanks for taking the time to help me 'Stein, but when I clicked on the "Hoster" link you provided, I got an immediate 404 - file not found error.

I will do a little googling about the host file corruption and the like, but perhaps you can provide other ideas.

Thanks!

Further to the above, I found Hoster and ran it. My Hosts file contains only 1 entry: "127.0.0.1 localhost", which from what I can gather is what should be there. I will appreciate any other ideas you might have on this problem. Thanks again.

Hmmm.

Have you tried accessing the sites while your firewall and AV is off?

Let's try this.

Hi, 'Stein! I disabled Norton AV and Norton Internet Security briefly as you suggested and tried accessing www.msnbc.com and www.ssa.gov several times each while they were turned off. I got the same results as before for both: "The page cannot be displayed ...cannot find server or DNS error". So the problem must be somewhere else. Thanks again for trying.

I am having the same problem with the newly designed MSNBC website. Can't view it with Norton Internet Security running. Tried turning off the firewall for a short period of time to no avail. Completley turned off Norton Internet Security and it worked until I tried to refresh the MSNBC home page. Any suggestions. Thanks.