Interesting. Originally I searched for "hosts" on the C Drive and nothing showed up. Now I've navigated to "windows\system32\drivers\etc, there's the "hosts" file. I can open it and it looks like the default hosts files with one exception, the last line is
::1 I tried to edit this out but was denied even though I'm logged in as the local administrator. I went to the command prompt and ran attrib on it and it show as an SHR. Checking another PC and normally this file doesn't have these attributes. I tried to change the attributes but still no luck. Finally, I tried renaming the hosts files to hosts.junk and that worked. Go figure. Then I copied a default hosts file from a different PC and that enabled Google.com. I don't have a clue as to why this fixed the problem. ---------------------- Bob Hartung Dir of I.T. Wisco Industries, Inc. 736 Janesville St. Oregon, WI 53575 Tel: (608) 835-3106 x215 Fax: (608) 835-7399 e-mail: bhartung(at)wiscoind.com _____ From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] To: NT System Admin Issues [mailto:ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com] Sent: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:41:38 -0600 Subject: RE: PC that can't Google Odd, even by default there’s one that has 127.0.0.1 in it. Show hidden and system files and look in hidden files and folders and look again, it should exist. From: Bob Hartung [mailto:bhart...@wiscoind.com] Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 7:04 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: PC that can't Google I've searched the C drive for any hosts file and couldn't find one. ---------------------- Bob Hartung Dir of I.T. Wisco Industries, Inc. 736 Janesville St. Oregon, WI 53575 Tel: (608) 835-3106 x215 Fax: (608) 835-7399 e-mail: bhartung(at)wiscoind.com _____ From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] To: NT System Admin Issues [mailto:ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com] Sent: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:57:32 -0600 Subject: RE: PC that can't Google HOSTS file? From: Bob Hartung [mailto:bhart...@wiscoind.com] Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 6:52 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: PC that can't Google One of our VPs brought in his company-supplied home PC (Dell Optiplex WinXP Pro SP3). Said it was slow and something had changed his home page and he couldn't change it back. He also said he couldn't access Google. His home page had been taken over by My Web Search. I checked the Vipre quarantine and parts of My Web Search had been removed so I could uninstall it. I ran a Vipre deep scan and installed the latest version of Malwarebytes and ran its deep scan as well. It detected a number of registry My Web Search entries. Everything seemed to be running smoothly and much quicker after the scanning and deleting. My Web Search was gone but the Google problem persists. Using either Firefox or IE, you can access any website with out problem accept Google.com. At the command prompt, you can ping or tracert any website and it will resolve the name to it's IP address, accept Google.com. Google.com just times out with the error that the host name could not be found. I've checked there is no lmhost file. I've also ran ipconfig The PC is attached to our work network and through DHCP has picked up our standard DNS server to use. Everyone else can get to Google.com. What else could be interfering on just the Google.com name? ---------------------- Bob Hartung Dir of I.T. Wisco Industries, Inc. 736 Janesville St. Oregon, WI 53575 Tel: (608) 835-3106 x215 Fax: (608) 835-7399 e-mail: bhartung(at)wiscoind.com ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin