I have this problem. None of my programs on my Vista can access the Internet except Microsoft Internet Explorer.

 

My vista version is Basic, installed on a laptop.

 

Any one can help?

 

thanks

Does Vista have a built-in firewall that's blocking them all?

check the UAC. that has caused problems like this for some people.

thanks for the replies

 

to cap: I have disabled all my firewalls, but problems still appear.

 

to insane: I always use the administrator privilege to open up my programs, by right clicking their icons and select the open with administrator privilege option.

 

I can definitely access the Internet on IE. BUT, I can't even do a "ping" command on the command prompt in Vista. This is indeed very strange, since if there is connection, "ping" command should always work. That is, I can't ping a host like google or yahoo for example, but the strange thing is I can ping and get response from my ISP's DNS server.

 

Any help or explanation to my problem?

 

thanks

You say you can't ping anything but then you go on to say you can ping your local DNS server. This does not sound like a configuration issue to me. It sounds like a local network issue (ie deliberate blockage). Have you talked to your local administrator? Please describe your networking environment. Are you connecting through a school network?

...This is indeed very strange' date=' since if there is connection, "ping" command should always work.

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This isn't true, while in the majority of cases it is correct, sometimes institutions will block certain ICMP packets to prevent certain network attacks or problems which will mean ping won't work (although I tend to get an error given but that isn't on windows).

 

I'm certainly not suggesting that this is your problem, I'm just stating that what you say about having a network connection and being able to ping things isn't always the case.