I have had this same problem also. I have been reviewing suggestions here, as well as from friends and other sources, but nothing has worked. No internet connections work while running windows, either wired or wireless, but I know the hardware is fine because I am running this from the same laptop using a linux live CD. I have:
-Gone through all of window's usual diagnostic b.s.
-Disabled IPv6 for both wired and wireless connections.
-Checked to make sure it was set to automatically acquire IP settings
-Edited registry and changed DCHP flags
-Changed power management setting so wireless/network cards cannot be turned off to save power.

All of these changes did not work, and some of them should definitely not be necessary. The location does not matter, and I have tried many different wired and wireless connections, sometimes with only 1 network available (so there should've been no conflict). Does anyone have any insight or alternative solutions? At this point I am really considering reinstalling windows, since I would like to go to a dual boot setup anyways...

Did you try my recommendation from the post above yours of unplugging the machine to reset the NICs? Seriously, not just power cycle it... disconnect the power for 10s or so..

Was this for a desktop though? I guess I can take out the battery on my laptop...

Please post if the battery removal worked or not. I'm curious if this solution works for laptops also.

Nope, it didnt work with my laptop... I unplugged and took the battery out. Still says local access only. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I really need the internet to work, as I have projects to complete and am out of town for a week. Once the week is over I can go back and reinstall windows if necessary, but unfortunately that is not an option now...

I have seen this problem when installing another firewall like Mcafee or Norton. Sometimes McAffee has been known to block when it should not. If you have McAfee installed trying turning off the block function. If you have Norton you might try uninstalling it and re installing it.

Good day.

This worked for me(With Vista): Look for a "Vista hotfix for wireless" out there on the net. I had it on my support cd btw. Then in network and sharing center when network is unidentified and local only access, change it from public to private network. Then unconnect, and connect back on. Then I got full access. It worked for me so just wanted to share it.

Wow. Excellent community you folks have here. Just thought I'd share my own solution to this problem:

While none of the suggestions I've seen had worked, I was troubleshooting through the "network card is keeping old data" possibility when I decided to pull the card entirely out of the motherboard. Out of curiosity, I installed the card into a different IDE slot.

When I restarted, I could connect to wifi networks, but no internet at ALL (I was earlier getting short, intermittent connections, but now- nothing.)

When I investigated, it turned out that Vista thought the card (a DLink) was an older Aetherios card I had installed a long time ago. Apperently, Vista still had the old drivers under "show hidden devices" in Device Manager. I uninstalled the driver. Still didn't work, so I had Device Manager check for new devices. It found it, re-installed the DLink drivers, and voila! It works, now!

I'm going to keep an eye on it and report back if I have further troubles, but the problem seemed to be this:

Even though it was identifying the two cards by the IDE slot they were installed in, and even though the two cards were never installed at the same time: it seems that Vista was switching back and fourth between the two different configurations, one of which obviously would not work at any given moment.

The strange thing is that no matter what, I could always access my router and access points with their 192.168.*.* addresses. Weird.

Also, for general edification: even though the old Aetherios drivers were still installed, I had them disabled, so they SHOULDN'T have been interfering, in a perfect world. Just goes to show: if anything at all CAN go wrong, Vista knows how to make it happen. XD

But that said, I'm just glad I didn't have to wipe my machine. Too much time has been invested into getting this set-up working with all my programs.

Hope this helps someone. And good luck to those it doesn't help. Keep trying!

Today I was trying to get my local connection online(That is with network cable instead of wireless), just wanted to check out if i could remove some disturbance in a game I played. When i deactivated local connection and started up the wireless connection again, I had some problems getting online. I remember I did a adjustment in local network, a setting to make the network shared with other computers, so I switched that back off, and at the same time I did that, my wireless connection went back on at once suddenly! Very weird in my opinion, but seemed like It did the trick and for some reason did not like that I had that option ON in the local network.

I must say, Vista is really scary sometimes, because to me that was really really weird. Why would that have something to say to get the frikkin wireless connection online.

I had no luck makin the local connection work by the way.

Well well, next time I go for good old XP, unless windows 7 is having only but good feedback.

I did this for my problem. It says I'm connected to the internet thru the wireless connection, but browser doesn't display web page. I can ping site such as yahoo and google. What else can I do?