First let me say that I no longer have access to this system so this question is mostly to see what I missed in trying to diagnose this problem because it is bugging me, and to see if anyone else has run into this type of situation.
system:
Core 2 duo
2 gig ram
xp pro
My friend just got a cable internet connection that he said was working fine. Until he decided he wanted to upgrade to the current version of firefox. So, decided to uninstall the current version from his system and that is when he lost all internet connectivity. He tried connecting through Internet Explorer and it just gave him the page that he was not able to connect. clicking on the diagnose problem would come up with the message to check your firewall and make sure ports 80 and 443 were not blocked.
so the first thing I did was to disable the firewall and to be sure no ports were blocked just in case --- no effect
I looked at his IP settings and he had a dedicated 192.168.x.x address assigned along with the dhcp manually assigned. So I changed both to automatic.
At this point I got a new IP address assigned after an /release and /renew ---- still no connection to the internet
I did a tracert to his provider and that worked. I also did a tracert to microsoft and to google ----- BOTH successful
I did eventually get him connected to the internet but that was by using a different computer that he got from his sister. so he is up and running. But the is bugging me so I was wondering if anyone had some insight or has run into this type of thing before.
At this point I know that his ip and dhcp is good and it is getting out to the net. But he still could not connect to the internet through Internet Explorer.