So here I am, at home, where as late as last night I was happy, carefree, and completely connected.
And after still hoping it was something triggered logging in at work that was causing difficulties, it’s clear that something on my machine has been set that’s causing me grief.
Rrg.
Basic symptom: only IE can access the Internet. Firefox, the external GTalk client, YIM, anything else that accesses the Internet errors out. But IE works perfectly. Well, as perfectly as IE (IE6, esp.) works.
Restarted in Safe Mode — hey, it all works! Yay!
Restarted in Normal Mode. Same problem. Boo!
*sigh*
Firewall is controlled by group policy (office laptop), currently in non-domain settings. I don’t know when this started or when that last changed. Is there a way to see what that’s doing (if not change it)? Would all that still apply when in Safe Mode?
Poking around on Google offers no interesting ideas. Anybody out there have one?
Okay, I’ve tried turning off, in Normal Mode, all the services and all the processes that are not running in Safe mode. And … no joy. Everything but IE continues to be blocked from Net access.
*sigh* Seriously unhappy about this.
Next step is to contact the company help desk and find out if this is something they’ve done. I have some legit arguments about not doing such a thing, but I need to get the lay of the land first. Alas, that can’t be done until Monday.
*sigh*
Whoa. My daughter came home from school last week with that exact, same problem! At first, we thought something was wrong with our home network, but the only machine having the problem was her laptop (64-bit runnin Vista Home). When she got back to school, the problem persisted. In fact, it got worse. Eventually, she couldn’t even see web pages with IE. She could only get on GTalk and that was about it. Connectivity was fine, but something was blocking web pages and eventually other things.
We tried everything, and I finally had her do a system restore back to the last time she remembered it working. She still has problems getting updates for AVG and Spybot, but at least she can see web pages in Firefox now.
Is this some kind of virus? Or is it a Vista update gone haywire?
Well, it’s XP, not Vista. And the latest-updated Norton says it’s not a virus. Hrm.
And, alas, System Restores had been disabled, so …