Web browsing issue

[Casawi]

Today I was modifying a USB driver that requested me to restart my computer, so I did. Now, my understanding is that a USB driver has nothing to do with my web browser, but since that's the last thing I did makes me wonder. My browser is unable to get information from the net, it can connect to a web address but no pages load up"waiting for www.google.com" for example. I know my internet conection is fine, because I can send and receive email via outlook. I tried restarting the computer, used three different browsers, I reinstalled firefox and IE7, I deleted the USB driver for assurance, I checked my ping in cmd prompt and its fine, I am not sure what else to do.
Also when I ping co-worker's IP address, I don't receive anything, so I am not sure how to fix this... does anyone have any idea what the problem is ?

Please help

Thanks.

 

[amdskip]

Try this: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winsockxpfix.html

 

[Casawi]

thanks

 

[Casawi]

Didn't help, but thx

 

[Spacehead]

Got a restore point you can go back to?
Firewall blocking you browsers?

 

[JDMnAR1]

Did you check your IP settings (ipconfig /all) to make sure your DNS entries, etc. haven't been FUBAR'd?

 

[Casawi]

I tried to restore, didn't work.
Firewall is OFF
I can ping google.com and works fine.
I ended up reformating my computer, but I am still curious to know what happened. A techsupport guy I called told me that there could be a problem when the browser try to interface with the USB wire car I had. This wasn't the case because I reinstalled the USB wire cards driver and I also attempted using a PCI wireless card. This was the strangest problem I ever had to deal with.