I have been facing a very weird problem lately, which i have never seen before nor can i make out any reason as to why this is happening.

Whenever i try to open any website in IE , it shows me "Detecting proxy settings............" and then no site is opened.

Now, im using a direct connection to the internet, and i am not using any proxy

- i have reset the IE settings to defaults but it doesnt work
- I have tried firefox but same error occurs
- And yes, i have checked in proxies, it is disabled

Weird thing is , i can do everything else except surfing. i can use download managers, connect to yahoo messenger network, torrents, absolutely anything which doesnt involve browsing.

Another weird thing is, when i enter any IP in the address bar, the site opens fine, but a domain name doesnt work.

- My ISP's DNS servers are working fine, cuz if i type ping google.com , it resolves google.com into the proper IP address.
- I tried manually adding the IP addresses to the HOSTS file but, it is not even trying to ask the hosts file for resolving the names.

Since the problem exists with both firefox and IE , i'd like to believe that its not a browser problem but something wrong with some settings somewhere which i cant seem to figure out.

Also, another thing i did was start wireshark ( packet analyzer ) and see where the TCP SYN packets are destined to go, but no packets are being sent by my browser.

also,
- all drivers are uptodate
- all updates are installed

Any help to solve this problem is greatly appreciated.