Strange Connection Issue

Ok, I've got an issue that's driving me nuts. I've actually seen it once before at a different company, but I wasn't the guy who solved it, and now I don't remember the solution. I've got a laptop here which has a good connection to the LAN, receives e-mail etc. From Command prompt I can ping any internal or external IP addy, and I can ping URL's.. So there would appear to be no problem with DNS name resolution etc. The problem? Neither IE nor Netscape will surf. They don't present any errors, they simply don't do anything bu try to connect...forever. I figure this must be something in the registry because it's effecting both IE and Netscape, but at the physical layer everything seems to be fine. We did check some of the registry settings re: the Winsock DLL and the Hosts and LMHosts file and did not see anything out of place...
PLEASE HELP. I'm going insane over this..

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Michael T. Hallman