Very weird: Suddenly nearly all websites are inaccessible

by gadg17 Jul 14, 2007 5:56AM PDT

This is the strangest thing ever: I have lost access to around 80 per cent of all websites, even though my internet connection seems to be OK.

Thers is no obvious pattern between sites I can and can't access. For instance, I can get to www.yorkshirepost.co.uk but not www.bbc.co.uk or www.google.com.

Here is what I have established:
Not browser-specific - have got the same result with IE6, IE7 and a shareware browser.

Email is not affected - Ooutlook Express works normally.

Have connected a laptop to the same ADSL router at the same time - it works fine.

There have been no configuration changes (AFAIK) that could have brought on this behaviour. My virus checker has found nothing.

I am running Windows XP. The only recent problem has been with a photo program, iView MediaPro, which kept freezing and requiring terminating. Don't know if that could be connected??

Can anyone suggest anything? Would really appreciate some advice!

Thanks
David

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Do you have a HOSTS file located in your ...

by Edward ODaniel Jul 14, 2007 6:35AM PDT

%WinDir%\system32\drivers\etc\ directory (folder)? It will have NO EXTENSION (hosts.sam is a SAMple hosts file).

If so open it in a text editor and see if the URLs you can't get to are listed. If they are it is likely that some malware has installed a hosts file for some nefarious reason - rename it, delete it or simply add an extension such as .bad and see if your luck has changed.

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Hi Edward

by gadg17 Jul 14, 2007 7:41AM PDT

Thanks for the reply.
I did check the hosts file and changed the extension but no luck.
I also tried a Syetem Restore, also without success.

After my first post I did a second System Restore, going a few days further back, and the PC froze in the middle of it. Since then it's refused to boot at all, even in Safe Mode, so I'm currently doing a repair reinstall of XP. At the time of writing, that seems to have frozen too, at the Installing Devices stage. Seeme to be going from bad to worse...

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Clean install still doesn't help

by gadg17 Jul 15, 2007 2:03AM PDT

OK, I've now done a clean reinstall of XP on a freshly formatted drive, with no old settings carried across - and the website behaviour is exactly the same as before.

How can this be? There must be a simple explanation??

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Fixed it

by gadg17 Jul 15, 2007 6:38PM PDT

Well, It's fixed but I'm not sure exactly how.

I played with the DNS settings in TCP/IP and with MTU settings in the registry - neither of which had been changed in the first place. Several router reboots later (and a clean install of Windows), all was back to normal.

All a bit of a mystery, really...

Very weird: Suddenly nearly all websites are inaccessible

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