Problem using browsers in Vista...

[NathanAllan]

Hiya guys,

I know it isn't vintage at all, but you are the smartest lot I know, so you may be able to answer this.

No browser will work at all; pings and all the command line stuff works, ping, tracert, ipconfig, it even has an IP address. I suspect there is a port issue and that 80 has been blocked or tied up.

Is there a tool or a place to look that I haven't yet?

I ran all the antivirus and spyware scanners, they all come up clean (now, this thing was choking on spyware and had a couple of garden variety viruses).

Help!

Nathan

[TandyMan100]

VISTA?!?!? You still use that ANCIENT operating system?!?!??

lol. This is how it's gonna end up being, now. XP is ancient history...

Yet, I still use MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.

[kvanderlaag]

Have you done a netstat to see if anything was using port 80?

Other than that, all I can think of is maybe proxy settings, if things like ping work.

[kb2syd]

I've also seen where people have accidentally blocked port 80 out or have blocked their browsers in their firewall. Try explaining to a noob how to undo that one on the phone when you don't even use the same firewall and have no experience with it.

[lutiana]

Are you able to ping by name? How about nslookup?

Typically the issue your describing in my experience is a DNS issue. But you may want to make sure that your firewall is not blocking the browsers (try disabling it completely).

What kind of router do you have?

[NathanAllan]

I have a netgear and a 2wire, other machines are hooked up and working. Name pings work (www.yahoo.com) and netstat -a shows nothing using port 80, everything listening. The IP address has port 139 right next to it.

All the IP stuff is using automatic settings, just like everything else here that's hooked up exactly the same way.

Been looking up how to change port 80 on the computer, coming up with more questions than anything else.

Sorry for the late reply, internet at home is off and I have to use the net here aqt the shop. Still searching.

Nathan

[Chuck(G)]

I keep a Knoppix LiveCD handy for those times when I need a sanity check. Boot it up; see if you can get out on port 80. If so, you know it's the Vista firewall that's screwed up.
Next step would be to turn Windows firewall off. If that works, then it's Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Windows Firewall and check the properties for each profile.

[NathanAllan]

Double checked, firewall is off for all profiles. Some windows updates go through, others fail. Re-running the malwarebytes tool; Did a rollback to earlier restore point and basically un-did everything done, so going back through it. Gotta get rid of windows PC defender again :\

I will be using a livecd very soon, but very sure this is a vista problem.

[barythrin]

Have you checked the registry for blocks to that domain name? Can you manually telnet to port 80 on the destination system and get a result (note the two enters after GET statement):



telnet www.yahoo.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1




It should come back with an HTTP/1.1 200 OK response and additional web server information. Obviously if this works than it's something with the browser config or it could be something with the driver, networking, tcp/ip stack, firewall, etc.

The worst malware I've had to treat has modified the tcp/ip drivers making it a royal PITA. sfc /scannow may check the Windows file system and repair modified files. I would do this after you have things clean though.

You may potentially need to run the malware scanner under safe mode to get around anything that's modified the Windows API enough to load every time and protect itself.

I ended up using Combofix on a real messed up system which had a dang rootkit installed which was kinda obvious when I wasn't able to get some things clean and the files were being hidden from me. As much as I hate these vaguely named applications and am reluctant to trust new malware scanners since from my experience most of the systems I clean are from trojan malware scanners but this app does seem legit and uses several other apps to look for the rootkits and I think it uses another app I used once (after several guests used my home laptop and gave me my first rootkit on there) called unhackme.

Anyway, again I'm reluctant to share apps with weird names but Obviously hijackthis, Spybot Search and Destroy and AdAware are good and free for personal use however don't
catch all the baddies like they used to :-(

Oh.. major warning with Combofix. It reboots the system without asking you, AND it does take a while to complete the scans it does upon reboot. I let it run for about 1.5hours on my desktop while it did complete. I think one reboot it may have failed but I manually rebooted and it continued properly.