I didn't find this after an archive search, so if I missed it somewhere - my apologies!

A friend of mine remarked he couldn't pull up certain pages when using his laptop - Hotmail, MSN Money Matters and MagicJack were of immediate concern to him. It's been doing this for a week. I checked his privacy and security settings, nothing amiss; checked Outlook Express, to make sure some setting there wasn't overriding IE; the Windows firewall is configured to allow the sites, and there's no third-party firewall; his cookies are enabled as far as I can tell; he has no A/V or antispyware program blocking sites; and his Hosts file is clean. Sure enough, though, navigate to these websites and a blank white page appears. This happens in IE, Firefox and Chrome so I think I can eliminate the browser as the culprit. Operating system is XP/SP3 with all updates.

He installed MagicJack after I cleaned out the laptop for him in December. Suspecting a glitch there, I checked all settings to no avail; uninstalled, then reinstalled the program - no change. For good measure, we connected the MJ hardware and tried again - no joy. His desktop pulls up the webpages no problem. To eliminate the wireless router as the culprit, we brought it to my house four miles away (his wireless was out of range) and connected it into my network. Same thing...so I guess the router firewall isn't blocking anything, either.

I'm out of ideas. Can anyone see something I may have missed?