Since I allowed windows update to run about 8 weeks ago, a lot of things dont work on my Vista laptop.. When I first ran the windows update NOTHING connected at all - Internet Explorer, Skype or Mozilla (maybe Yahoo! messenger did, I cant remember) However, I rolled back a couple of the updates (I didnt know how many to rollback) and got IE to work again (IE8), and it works fine. But I still can't get Firefox to connect at all (it says "unable to connect. Firefox (3.6.6) cannot establish a connection to the server XX" no matter which url I type in. Skype cannot connect either - and I have tried all that Skype tech support can suggest - including completely uninstalling - deleting all the registry settings, files etc and reinstalling skype.. I am having problems too with google chat and google video plugin - the latter will not connect at all.. I also had problems with Adobe Air and a couple of phone applications like skype.. Flash would not run in IE8, so I tried reinstalling it, and it kept saying it needed a proxy server (I definitely do not have one - I checked with my ISP). So I installed Flash using the manual install, and now it works. I sometimes have very slow performance in IE8 too - not sure if this is related to my other issues or not.. even though every time I reboot no processes are starting except the minimum windows services because I did msconfig. My Firewall is disabled, so that is not it. The problematic laptop IS on a wireless network most of the time, but just to be sure that wasnt the problem, I plugged it straight into the internet and had the same problem.. also another pc on the same network has no problems running any of this software (but it runs Windows 2003 Server - it is my server machine). PLEASE help this is driving me nuts TIA

I dont know if this helps but I also found that telnet wont work on my pc - it says "could not open connection to host X on port X"

Hi, Have you tried reset IE 8 settings? Click Tools->internet options->under Advanced tab, click Reset.... If this doesn't work, I would suggest create a new account to check if the previous profile become corrupt. Please refer to: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows-vista/Create-a-user-account Regards,Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.