Re: Internet is up but IE is down - how to fix?

Thanks for your detailed reply. But I'm technically savvy. That
seems very technical to me and will need me sit down for hours to
install it, set it up, tweak, and monitor.

Can something like Norton Internet Suite or Mcafee Internet Suite
be able to find the problem and fix it if it's some malware?



On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:04:08 -0500, Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Paul wrote:
noxbox wrote:
My XP system has the internet connectivity. Ping and tracert
work perfectly. No data loss. Newsreader Agent also works fine
as I'm using it right now. But IE doesn't run. It returns the
error page saying:

"The page cannot be displayed The page you are looking for is
currently unavailable. The Web
site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may
need to adjust your browser settings."

Sometimes It can load the homepage after a long time. But it
deosn't go beyond that.

I tried Mozilla Firefox. It doesn't work either.

IE on another XP computer on the same home network works fine.
So there couldn't be anything wrong with the network.

My system has Spybot and the free AVG anti-virus installed. I
still suspect some trojan or something vicious did this. How to
fix? What program can fix it?


Internet services use "ports". Maybe there is a firewall doing this,
set to block port 80 outgoing ? But if the blockage is intermittent, then
it could be malware of some sort. NNTP is port 119 according to
this.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

Paul

Browsers can also use web proxies, but I don't know how or where you
set that up in the browser. At one time, we used to manually configure
proxy settings, but I think there is also some automated protocol for it.

In Firefox, you can type "about:config" in the URL box, to see all
the settings that Firefox is using. In the "Filter" box, you could
type "proxy" and look for something suspicious.

Another tool you can use, is Wireshark (formerly caller Ethereal).
It will trace packets going to an Ethernet interface, so you can see
what is being sent and received. Some malware is savvy enough, to
adjust behavior when Wireshark is running, so no guarantees. I use
Wireshark, any time I see suspicious activity when the computer is
idle etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireshark
http://www.wireshark.org/about.html

When Wireshark is running, you can set View:Name_Resolution:Network_Layer
to ON, and that will convert numeric IP addresses into symbolic ones. It
may be disabled by default, to avoid any mechanisms where a mistranslation
was going on.

To capture, you use Capture:Interfaces and click "Start" on the interface
that is carrying the traffic.

A basic program that fetches a file over port 80, would be something
like GNU wget. It is actually a command line program, but the executable
is sometimes shipped as part of other packages. I would experiment with
something like that, as another "browser" and see what happens. The copy
I got, came with http://winwget.sourceforge.net/ . I don't use the
Windows wrapper they built, but when you do the install, there is a
separate "wget" folder, which has the GNU stuff in it. In a DOS
window, you can type "wget.exe --help" and see the options. An annoying
"manual" window will pop up, but you also see the options for the program
listed in the DOS window. Wget has a number of options, but I would expect
wget <URL> would fetch a basic file from a web site.

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.txt

Example command - this put a copy of the "port-numbers" text file, into the
wget directory on my C drive (because I CD'ed there, before running wget).

wget http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

Paul

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