Can ping websites, but can't load their pages

I'm trying to fix a friends notebook for him. I built it for him a month or so ago, and everything has worked great, up until last night.

Websites just won't load. IE and Mozilla (which I just installed to make sure it wasn't just some IE problem) find the website (google.com, microsoft.com, etc.), but it just stalls and says "Waiting for [insert any website]..."

However, I can ping any website and immediately get a reply. Anti-virus is disabled, there is no firewall installed (and the Windows firewall is disabled), and all settings that I could think to check out look fine. (Edit) Forgot to say that if I wait long enough, IE tells me "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

Thanks in advance!

Behind a router? If so, connect directly and see if it works.

Might also want to try a quick DNS flush, although I'm sure you've probably rebooted a few times already. Go to the command line and do ipconfig /flushdns and try to connect again.

Lastly, is IPv6 installed? If so, remove it.

That you very much for the reply, but I figured it out. It was stupid McAfee AV (man I hate that stuff more then Norton). I would shut down McAfee, and then stop all of it's services. Well, apparently that wasn't enough to tame the bloatware. It still has some email scanning process running in the back ground, and that alone was not letting me surf the web. Talk about garbage. There were no settings to configure the email scanning, you could only disable it or enable it.

Give this a try, if all you need is a antivirus then it should work. I've used it for years and no real problems.
AVG