IE not resolving some addresses

[roger]

My IE is not resolving many addresses, such as this site, google, etc. This behaviour is new as of today (worked on friday). I am accessing this site through firefox. Everything that doesn't work through IE works through this browser.

Security settings, etc, all look okay in IE, but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for anyways.

Advice? I did the standard logout/reboot stuff.

[ShowMe]

Do a google serach for cwshredder.exe; download it & run it.

Go to http://www.download.com and download spybot search & destroy v 1.3; download it, update it & run it.

Chances are pretty good that those 2 programs will cure a lot of your ills.

That, or you could just continue using firefox & not worry about IE.

[WorldBuilder]

Agreed, although I prefer Ad Aware 6 from Lavasoft. Basically, what he's saying that you have a serious case of IE Hijacking.

You might have virii, too.

IE sucks...

Chris

[roger]

I don't understand why this advice is being offered. My browser is not hijacked, at ;east in any conventional sense; I get the "IE was unable to link to the web page you requested" page. The one that says to press refresh or work offline. I'm not being redirected anywhere.

I already have ad- aware, spybot, symantec antivirus - I should have reported that I already did these scans before I made this thread.

Not fixing IE is not an option for me.

[Grammatron]

Originally posted by roger
I don't understand why this advice is being offered. My browser is not hijacked, at ;east in any conventional sense; I get the "IE was unable to link to the web page you requested" page. The one that says to press refresh or work offline. I'm not being redirected anywhere.

I already have ad- aware, spybot, symantec antivirus - I should have reported that I already did these scans before I made this thread.

Not fixing IE is not an option for me.

Do you access Internet through a Proxy server and/or do you have a Firewall?

[roger]

no proxy. I am behind a corporate firewall.

(You may well ask why I didn't just ask the corporate IT department to fix this for me. because 'fix' = 'we'll reinstall everything for you')

I downloaded cwshredder, nothing found.

[Grammatron]

Originally posted by roger
no proxy. I am behind a corporate firewall.

(You may well ask why I didn't just ask the corporate IT department to fix this for me. because 'fix' = 'we'll reinstall everything for you')

I downloaded cwshredder, nothing found.

This is sort of a long shot since you can access through a different browser but try going to IP instead of the actually address. Try this (don't worry it's just Google) :
http://66.102.7.104/

Also

Go to Tools>Internet Options>Connections>LAN Settings and see if the "Automatically Detect Settings" is checked, that might help.

[roger]

no, the IP doesn't work either, though of course I can ping it fine.

automatically detect settings is not checked.

[Grammatron]

Originally posted by roger
no, the IP doesn't work either, though of course I can ping it fine.

automatically detect settings is not checked.

Check it and see if that helps.

If it doesn't, go to Tools>Internet Options>Advanced and click Restore Defaults and see if that works.

[WorldBuilder]

Originally posted by roger
I don't understand why this advice is being offered. My browser is not hijacked, at ;east in any conventional sense;...Well, I apologize for trying to help! It was a start, and I have other thoughts, but I don't feel like sharing them with you now.

Chris

[roger]

Originally posted by WorldBuilder
Well, I apologize for trying to help! It was a start, and I have other thoughts, but I don't feel like sharing them with you now.

Chris Okay. I apologize for not understanding.

[bignickel]

If your behind a corporate firewall, then what occurs to me right off the bat is: all those sites are being blocked by your company.

Either that, or an entire part of the net is being blocked.

Or even better yet: your own company is being blocked (your request is not even making it to the JREF page).

[garys_2k]

Hosts file corrupted?

[roger]

Bignickel, those were my thoughts, also, but I downloaded and installed firefox and I can view the sites fine with this browser.
It's just IE that can't see the sites. I can also ping them and get a response. If I understand this correctly (and I am not very knowledgable in this part of computers), we can rule out being blocked by a firewall.

gary, I deleted the hosts file and rebooted to no effect.

I've also reset everything I can in IE to defaults, deleted all temporary files and cookies, went to windowsupdate and made sure I am fully up to date. I logged in to this computer under another account and had the same problem - can't access some sites in IE, but can access everything in firefox (was thinking maybe something in my user profile was messed up).

I also uninstalled and reinstalled both ad-aware and spybot, just in case they were whacked by a spyware program, downloaded the latest reference files, and did a scan with both. Nothing came up.

I guess I better talk to my IT department. ugh.

Thanks for all the help.

[bignickel]

Whoa. I may be wrong on this, but I think that you need hosts file in your windows computer, at least to resolve localhosts correctly.

I recommend creating a hosts file on your computer ASAP (not hosts.txt, which notepad will try to do); I have mine in C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc. Make sure you at least have the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" in it.

I had a notion that the problem was asp/java related; but then I re-read your post: IE is just not resolving the IP correctly. But Firefox is.

So the only thing I can think of is the IE is fundamentally broken in some way. It's sending out a request to the IP address, but it's either 1. not being sent by IE 2. IE is getting the response, but not handling it correctly.

EDIT - adware is OK but not super. Please get Hijack this and CWSchredder. There IS a possibility that adware has screwed up your registry settings: many of these things set up their own proxy server on your computer, and so all web requests go there first, before being sent out again into the internet.

There IS a possiblity that the 1. IE settings in registry have been severly messed up, which is why firefox works. 2. any IE requests are being sent to the proxy server, which is broken in some way (or worse: they're being re-directed to a non-existant site).

[roger]

a new hosts file is created if it is missing. I verified that it exists. My old one had a lot of ad servers referenced to 127.0.0.1, and so I deleted it just in case somehow some good sites got in that list.

I already ran cwshredder. I just did hijack this, everything looks okay-i recognize all the processes and registry entries.

My virus file is 6/7/2004.

I logged onto another computer on our network and was able to view all the sites from IE on that computer, so it is not corporate wide.

I'm trying a reinstall of IE now.

[roger]

Fixed!!

The reinstall did it. I'm posting this from IE6, rather than firefox.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

[bignickel]

Glad to hear it. Didn't know that hosts got created automatically; doesn't on WinNT4 and a few others. Which OS you have?

I can't re-edit my post, so I want to clarify:
AdAware, not adware, is OK but not super. Please get Hijack this and CWSchredder. There IS a possibility that adware has screwed up your registry settings.

[roger]

2000 pro.