My IE8 and Mozilla got slower and slower and finally ground to a complete halt a few days ago. IE8 loads and says 'Connecting' forever, Mozilla never even opens a window, just a few seconds of hourglass and then gone.

I removed all antivirus and all Symantec products, turned off the firewall and removed the last 20 or so automatic updates from Microsoft and disabled all the plugins but nothing made any change whatsoever. All along background automatic updates have worked and Outlook Express loads, gets and sends email and has normal newsgroup access. Many of the posts on these forums blame all internet connectivity problems on antivirus products or the firewall but if Chrome works and the others do not, what sense does that make?

At sometime in the past, I had installed Chrome but never used it. In desperation I tried it and it works without any problems.

Now, what is Chrome not looking at that that IE8 and Mozilla is? There must be some major difference in these three browsers. I am getting used to Chrome but I would really like some help in finding out why this happened.

TIA, zp18

get a decent antivirus and scan your system while in safemode. then scan it with spybot, fully updated and in safemode too. hopefully this will fix your problem. If not, a clean reinstall of windows would do.

ps. as an antivirus, i recommend AVG free or Avira. and never EVER use norton or symantec.