Earlier this month, I ran into a very frustrating problem on a clients’ XP computer system. All of a sudden, whenever they would try to open up a web page in Internet Explorer, the result would be “The page cannot be displayed”.
But that was not the frustrating part! This computer was working fine a few days earlier, so something had changed so that now Internet Explorer could not display web pages. The first thing we did was try to ping the websites from the command prompt, thinking that the problem was with the network card, the LAN, or something of that sort.
Pinging the websites actually worked! So now it was really weird. We could ping the websites from the command line, but could not open the page in Internet Explorer. So logically, we jumped to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the proxy settings in Internet Explorer, because DNS is obviously working correctly.
Wrong again! The proxy settings were empty. So if the problem was not related to proxy settings and the TCP/IP protocol was working fine, then what could be the problem? Well, we decided to install another browser and then open a few web pages.
It worked! So Firefox and Google Chrome could load the web sites fine, but not Internet Explorer. We thought about some crazy ideas along the way like the following:
- Uninstalling and reinstalling IE
- Running the Winsock fix utility
- Disabling all add-ons in IE
- Running SFC /SCANNOW
However, none of this made sense and we didn’t want to waste a ton of time. So after a while of brainstorming, someone came up with the brilliant idea to see what new software was installed on the computer in the last few days.
Finally, we saw that the user had installed a anti-virus program that had a built-in firewall! The firewall was set to block Internet Explorer from accessing the Internet and therefore was the culprit!
Overall, it was a very good learning experience and I thought I would share it with everyone since it can be super frustrating if you don’t think about third party applications that can cause problems like this. Enjoy!
I have had this problem a couple of years ago…it bugged me for a whole week. That's when the network mgmt. guy at my office figured out that it was Norton Internet Security program (that came bundled with laptop) that was blocking the browser. And since it had no uninstall option, I had to install Norton Removal Tool to actually get rid of it. That solved the prob.
Thank You!
I have been racking my brain for two days trying to figure out why both ie and firefox would not load webpages, but chrome would. Turned out that the user had turned off the firewall in Kaspersky Internet Security, and when the firewall is off apparently executables that are on the approved list get blocked if they change, but you don't get asked if you want to unblock them.
indeed frustrating, i had the same problem with a client's computer, and it made me crazy, then the client told me that she has unistalled the norton bundled antivirus and firewall, so i used the norton removal tool and the problem was fixed, apparently some configuration of the firewall remained after uninstallation preventing IE from showing websites. Huge help to read what happened to you guys, hope this make someones life easier.
Thank you!!! I had this problem with AVG 2011. No web pages would show and it drove me crazy!!!
What a relief!!