Cannot connect to some websites with either IE or Netscape

[szamkow]

Win ME system suddenly cannot connect to some sites/pages with either IE 5.5 SP2 or Netscape 7.1. All other computers on the same office LAN can access these problem locations, so its not the locations or a router/ISP problem.

For example, this machine cannot connect to

http://www.tigerdirect.com.

In Netscape it comes back with a "The operation timed out when attempting to connect..." error. In IE, it comes back with a "We cannot find

http://www.tigerdirect.com"

page from search.msn.com, and the offer to find the similar site "

http://www.tigerdirect.com"

(which does not work either.)

Also, this system can navigate everywhere within ebay.com, except specific item pages. All the general pages and searches work fine but clicking on any specific item title, brings up the following errors:
IE - "This page cannot be displayed..." (Cannot find server or DNS error)
Netscape - Msgbox: "The connection was refused when attempting to contact cgi.ebay.com"

This system runs the latest Norton AV and the latest Ad-Aware and Spybot, all just rescanned so there are no known viruses or browser hijackers in place.

The DNS entries are the same as the other working systems. I've cleared the caches and I've run out of ideas. <g>

Any suggestions would be appreciated. TIA.

 

[smah]

Tiger direct tends to have pop-up ads at the home page. Some ebay pages also have banner ads. I have seen this problem caused by popup blockers and Spybot's immunize function. I have also seen it happen at

http://www.msnbc.com

and

http://www.weather.com,

both of which also often have pop-up ads and banner ads that popup immediately.

 

[szamkow]

Thank you!

I dug into Spybot (I'm an Ad-Aware user myself) and by renaming the C:\Windows\Hosts file to Hosts.xxx, the problem was corrected for those sites mentioned.

One possibly related issue was not corrected. Accessing the Windows ME System Info still gives a &quot;Page cannot be displayed&quot; server or DNS error for the Help and Support Page.

This may be a different problem that that has existed for a long time and I only noticed it now because I attempted to access the Help while looking at the first problem.

If you have any ideas on this, they would be appreciated.

Thanks again for pointing me at the solution.