Browser Problem?

[BCLG100]

So right now i am unable to access a load of sites on the internet.
www.facebook.com
www.download.com
Whilst im unable to login to snitz forums
www.civ3duelzone.com
and can't search on google, i can get to the google mainpage but am unable to search.

In all cases (except CDZ) i can type in the address and hit enter but the tab just is constantly loading, with either whatever i had there previously or a blank screen. This is the same on firefox as on IE, i havent tried any other browsers but i think it is a problem on my computer. In the case of cdz, i can access everything there just unable to login, whenever i enter my password and hit enter the screen just moves on to a blank screen and when i refresh i'm back where i started.

Weirdly i am able to access some sites, here (obviously), hotmail, bbc.co.uk. But many of the sites are extremly slow to load. And occasionally google lets me search.

The only firewall i have is windows defender and i have the resident spybot thing running, i've attempted to turn both off and still i have no access to any of the sites.

I've run spybot, got rid of everything- even going as far as to unimmunizing everything and uninstalling spybot before trying and still no luck then re-installing. I've run AVG, it told me i had a couple of trojans and virus loaders but they were deleted. I've uninstalled firefox and attempted to use an earlier version, i've tried running firefox in safe mode but still no joy.

I'm not sure if its connected but throughout the day i've had a notifier saying that auto updater was not on, even after i checked and made sure it was. However, whilst writing it suddenly worked.

I'm getting tonnes of error messages from within the error console from firefox but as i've never really looked there before im unsure if thats normal.

Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property HTMLDivElement.parentNode

So anyway, any advice would be greatly appreciated because i am pretty much all out of ideas. (hopefully its something obvious)

edit- and yeah i've tried rebooting

edit2- I'm on windows xp home edition

 

[Cutlass]

That's usually something like a firewall problem. You say you tried turning it off. You could try switching to a different firewall like Zone Alarm. Not sure what else to tell you.

 

[BCLG100]

Is there anyway to check whether i have one running? i downloaded a free one which had a virus inside and allthough i got rid of it instantly it may still be running.

 

[Cutlass]

If you open up the Task Manager, it will tell you all of the processes that are running. And since you won't recognize most of them, you can write down all the names and search to figure which is which. Run an anti virus, and download and install zone alarm as a firewall. Running that should automatically shut down any different firewall.

 

[BCLG100]

Well i've run avast and AVG and got rid of anything i had. I've got zonealarm also and that is running. However my problems still persist.

So is there anything further that i can do?

i've tried a system restore to a point where i had no problems. The only option i can see open to me is formatting my comp but that really can't be my only option for a broswer problem.

 

[BCLG100]

Also just incase anyone was wondering i found a couple of tools which check your system to see which firewalls are running.

http://www.trolly.homepage.t-online.de/tools.html

So i have these apparantly

Windows Firewall is off
1 Service(s) from ZoneAlarm (TrueVector) detected
8 Service(s) from AVG (AVG) detected
1 Service(s) from Norton/Symantec (SYMTDI) detected
firewall process from ZoneAlarm detected

I uninstalled norton awhile back so i am curious as to why its still there.

 

[Cutlass]

Some of those programs don't uninstall all the way, even though they should. I really don't know what else to tell you.