Hi,
My Mom's computer has a bit of an internet connection problem. I had the same dilemma about a year and a half ago and ended up reformatting my computer to fix it. I'm hoping that won't have to happen to hers. Here it is. Her Gateway desktop (windows xp home) says it's connected at 100kbs (according to the icon in the notification area). However, when trying to open Firefox or IE or even when trying to ping a site, BAM!! nothing. I went through the basic stuff I know like flushdns, release, renew and still nothing. Uninstalled Spybot (it added so many entries to the hosts file, I thought maybe it was "plugged up") and reset the hosts file back to it's original state. Still nothing. Her Gateway laptop (windows vista) can connect to the same modem as the desktop with no problems. Around the time this started, I heard about a bug (virus?) that would cause any attempt at a connection to a website to be redirected back to the local host. I used displaydns and used a couple addresses from that info to check it out. Eventually I gave up. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you