Can't access Search Engines!

[SebAguilera]

Hi guys,

I have two computers connected to the Internet via a DLINK router.
Ad-Aware, Ad-Watch,and PC-Cillin are running.
I use Win XP but do not have the Microsoft Internet Connection Firewall on.
Computer1 has no problems whatsoever.
Computer2 however cannot access any search engines. I tried using google, msn, and yahoo.
I cannot acces

http://www.google.com

at all.
I can access

http://www.msn.com

and

http://www.yahoo.com

but as soon as I try running a search I get page not found errors.
I can access most other sites but I feel that this issue is just a symptom of a larger problem.
I have tried pinging google and the request times out
I can ping each computer connected to the router with no problem.
I turned off Ad-Aware, Ad-Watch,and PC-Cillin and still got nothing.
This is weird....Any ideas guys???

Here is a list of sites that are not accessible at all:
google
msn
yahoo
Lycos
LookSmart
AltaVista
HotBot

I can access these search engines and run searches on them:
InfoSpace
MetaCrawler
About.Com
Netcenter
Snap
WebCrawler


Thanks
Sebastian

 

[SebAguilera]

Looks like I found the solution. Some spyware or adware seems to have changed my HOSTS file and added all the search engines that I mentioned to it thus blocking me from accessing them. I just deleted the entries and everything worked fine!. By the way the HOSTS file is located in %systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts (where %systemroot% is your Windows folder, depending on OS c:\windows, c:\winnt).

Open this file with notepad and check if there are listings. The only listing you normally need in there is 127.0.0.1 localhost. If you have listings for google.com etcetera, delete them.
To make changes effective, either reboot or give the command "ipconfig /flushdns"


Thanks a ton!!!!!

Sebastian