Hope for help....

Not much to go on. We need to know a lot more.

- What browser?
- What messages?
- What web connexion method & speed?
- What firewall service?
- What anti-virus & anti-spyware is running?

The error occurs with both IE and Mozilla. When we attempt to go to a website, it says "connecting" for about 5-6 minutes and then we get a message that says: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage. Most likely causes: You are not connected to the Internet (which we are), The website if encountering problem (which it's not because we can get to it through my wife's computer through a VPN), There might be a typing error in the address (ok...I'm not stupid...I know the web address and can type it correctly)"

Not having a technical background, I might misstate some of this, but hopefully, you'll get what I mean. We have a broadband connection through PPPoE to a Linksys wired router -- not sure of all speeds, but we have 3 computers in the router. My wife's computer uses a VPN through her Company and she has no issues hitting any of the websites. The only firewall on the computer with the issue is the regular Windows firewall. The virus and spyware software that's running is Avanquest's Fix-It Utilities 8. We had Norton and then McAfee and had LOTS of problems with system performance with them both.

The odd thing is that we were logged into a website one night, closed it and left the computer and when we tried to go to the same website first thing the next morning, it wouldn't connect. Nothing else was done in the meanwhile.

Is that enough information to go on? We really appreciate any help that can be provided!!

OK. So as I understand you, there is just one of three computers that has a problem. It's not quite clear to me, but I deduce that the one computer with issues has 100% issues. It cannot get onto the web at all. The other computers can all get onto the web, including the one that uses VPN - when it doesn't use VPN it can connect to all web sites.

A few first things to try before we suspect malware are as follows (whilst connected to the router):

1/
Invoke START-->RUN-->CMD

2/
In the command window type IPCONFIG /ALL>C:\IPCONFIG(1).TXT

This will save your IP settings into the file on C:\IPCONFIG.TXT. This will enable you to copy and paste the contents into a post if necessary.

3/
Type IPCONFIG /RELEASE
To release your adapter's IP address

4/
Type IPCONFIG /RENEW

5/
Type IPCON|F|IG /FLUSHDNS followed by
IPCONFIG /registerdns

6/
Type IPCONFIG /ALL>C:\IPCONFIG(2).TXT

This lot should clear out some of the glitch problems that can occur from time to time. Post the before/after results that you saved to C:\.

If the problem isn't resolved, we'll need o see a Hijack This Log (read the first couple of posts in the Spyware forum).

Anything we need to know about the web site you went to before the problem occurred? Any other computer successfully using that web site?

Can your affected PC log onto the Linksys router via
HTTP://192.168.1.1