I have a Dell Optiplex 960 desktop, about 18 months old.  A vieus
rendered its hard drive unbootable, so I used the restore disks I had
made to rewrite the OS partition.  I've reinstalled all the drivers and
applications I can find.

There is a gigabit NIC on the motherboard, and a second installed as a
factory option -- one has a BroadCom chip and the other seems to take an
Intel driver.  
  Last night, I hooked up my ASIX AX88772 USB-to-Ethernet adaptor and
installed its drivers, freshly downloaded, but I have the same problem
with it.

  Whichever of these three NICs I use, I get the same results.  The
machine receives a DHCP address assignment from my router, and I can
ping the router, Google (resolved using DNS), and a router on campus
seven miles away across the Internet.  And everything works fine if I
reboot into Ubuntu Linux, so I'm confident that the hardware all works.

  The problem is specific to Windows 7 (this is the 32-bit "ultimate"
version).  Neither IE (reloaded with the OS, which means it's not up to
date) nor Firefox (11.0, downloaded about 2 weeks ago) can ever connect
to a web page -- not even the web page of my router, which means it's
not an ISP issue.  Automatic Update and antivirus updates say they are
looking for updates, and don't report any error -- they just never find
them.  (IE sometimes reports that it "cannot display the web page", but
is unable to offer any helpful hints why not.)


  Can anyone else suggest something I should check or try?  

David Gillett



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