HELP!!! - My connection appears to be blocking most sites

[midi]

Yesterday morning my PC started playing silly buggers.

It won't let me access most websites. I've tried everything I can think of. There are a couple of sites I can access such as my work Exchange server over the web client and brainburst.com. My widgets on my Vista sidebar sync up and if I go onto eMule it works fine. I can't however bring up google and msn won't connect. I can't get onto the BBC neither. If I try pinging these sites I get tmes ranging from 30ms to almost 200ms. Sometimes it totally times out, sometimes it's perfect, sometimes intermittent.

Denise managed to get Google up at one point when messing around with the Firewall but we couldn't replicate it even when taking the Firewall completely down.

The only thing I haven't done up until this point is reset the router as I've setup Port Forwarding on it and didn't want to mess around with it. I'm 99% certain the router isn't the problem as it has been working perfectly for weeks without anyone touching it.

I'm runniong Windows Vista Ultimate with Firefox as my main browser. Windows Firewall is set up and my ISP is Sky (sic) with one of there standard Netgear routers.

Any ideas cos I'm stumped?

[Toyman1952]

When you access your router there should be a screen to backup the configuration. Then reset the router to factory defaults and try it. If it works you will be able to restore the backup and it will probably work fine.

[ViprXX]

I'm assuming you tried IE also and tried resetting IE back to defaults, with windows firewall off. Or goto the routers setup page and try disabling its firewall and see if that helps. other than that, I'd try resetting the router. just backup the config before like toyman suggested or just setup portforwarding again.

good luck