Before a friend asked me to help a friend of hers with a PC problem, I never knew so many people are suffering from the same issue: Here is a proof. And the problem does not seem to stop with Vista. It seems to be epidemic in the Windows world. Many seem to suffer from the same problem or with a slight twist one way or another.
The problem was initially communicated to me simply as: She couldn't get on the Internet, which I thought was simple. However, a little big of digging around revealed something different: The laptop (an Acer Exensa 5420-5687, running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit OS) connects to the network fine, either wired or wireless. The problem is that the browsers don't work, although nslookup returns DNS name lookup results fine and pinging IP addresses or host names responds normally.
So far, I have tried running netsh winsock reset, netsh int ipv4 reset, etc. Nothing has changed. Disabling all third party services in msconfig didn't help. I have removed Symantec anti-virus, there is no Norton on the machine.
Under wireshark, I can see DNS packets going out of the network interface when connected on wireless. No action in a browser has generated any outgoing packets. That seems to tell me that there is something gone bad somewhere in the Windows TCP/IP stack that completely blocked traffic from any browser application. That may sound bizarre, but this is Windows! Anything could happen.
Rebuilding the OS may be much easier than trying to figure out what is wrong, however trivial the problem may be in the end. But the owner says she has lost the discs, maybe the machine never came with one. So that may leave me with no choice but to become a pirate.
[2011-03-19] -- The removal of expired Symantec stuff may not have been as clean as it should/could have been. Anyway, the problem is resolved using the Norton Removal Tool. Also worth noting is this thread of discussion about this exact problem, which contains a posting with a compiled list of different things that may have something to do with the problem.
Every time I encounter a problem like this, I thank Linus Torvalds for Linux.
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