Windows Vista - Can ping but not surf

[Paperlantern]

Windows Vista Home Premium machine. System can ping google.com and other sites, but will NOT go to any site via IE or Firefox. This is a teenager's machine, and I wonder if she has a virus.

Everything i have run across in my searches says to do one of a few things.

First is disable any firewalls, I have disabled windows firewall, and do not see any other software running. Symantec 360 appears in the programs list, but errors when i try to uninstall it so it doesnt even appear to be installed, or at least not installed correctly (i am aware that this could potentially be the issue).

Second is to do the following at an elevated command prompt

netsh winsock reset catalog

Rebooted, no change

Third was to add the reg key "DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle" to the registry in the correct place, again, no change.

Tried telnet www.google.com 80 to see if it is maybe being blocked by the system outbound. I received the error "Connection failed". Again this points back to the flaky install of Symantec. Should I pursue the Symantec theory and maybe try to rip it out completely manually, or should I try some other methods?

Incidentally I also tried restoring the machine to 1 month prior, this also, did not work.

Does anyone have any suggestions for anything i haven't tried? Any help or insight is welcome.

 

[Elias824]

Symantec is a pain and that could likely be the issue. You can try restoring the settings in IE to default, Under internet option somewhere, Though it dosent sound like a browser problem so Im not sure how much that will help. Id say get rid of symantec and at the very least you can see if that is the issue or not.

 

[Paperlantern]

Okay, I did resolve this, and Elias824, we were correct, it was Symantec. I also found out today that the user has been having this issue for over a month, so I was wrong to think a month would have been far enough back to restore it.

Anyway, as i said in the original post, the install of Norton 360 was hosed, it wouldnt open, wouldn't load, and wouldnt uninstall, even as administrator, so it wasn't a permissions thing. I was about to go through the registry and the program files folders with a machete when i did a search for problems uninstalling Norton. perhaps someone has had this issue before, and they HAD, there is actually a UTILITY made BY Symantec to remove a number of their products. I used that, it uninstalled, and all is was right in the world again. IE and Firefox functioned fine. Norton was blocking OUTBOUND port 80, stupid but true.