My computer hates some web sites and refuses to go to them

Factual Questions
1

CNN.com, ESPN.com, isitdown.com refuse to load. All 3 major browsers act this way. There’s no pretense of loading the website, it just gives up immediately. Chrome says: Error code: ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED. Firefox says: The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

We turned off the firewall, flushed the sockets, closed idle sockets, turned off “Use TLS 1.0”, got nowhere.

Any ideas of what could be going on? I get Reuters.com, Reddit.com, this site, popsci.com, salon.com just to name a few.

2

You have a virus or malware.

3

Or the hosts file got screwed up.

4

Please explain what the hosts file is, what it does, and how to fix.

Please?

5

check your PM

6

Are you in Britain? Are you with BT? If so they had a major screw-up but it’s fixed now.

7

His browsers just needed the crud blown out of them, some kind of add in/toolbar/browser mod. I did a quick remote session with him/her

8

Thanks for the help, but it’s back, twice. It did the same thing, so I downloaded a new copy of ADW Cleaner, and then Pandora and CNN opened, but in still in the first song playing on Pandora, it stopped, and Firefox once again says it can’t access the network when I try those two sites. Mind you, I’m typing this on the same computer. LAtimes.com works, too.

9

I all of a sudden a few days ago stopped being able to access some websites, such as www.gambling911.com, a site with news about las vegas and gambling…i get knocked offline for a minute and message comes up–we are restarting browser…i have aol…aol sent out a mass message two days ago saying there’s a problem with accessing certain sites and they are working on it…so someone is aware of what is happening and they are fixing it at least for aol customers
meanwhile, if you view a website via www.freeproxyserver.ca or similar proxy you can see the sites fine