Strange corruption allows access to only Google sites

The personal web site of Tim Daly in the Northern Rivers of NSW.

Strange corruption allows access to only Google sites

Corruption

Today I had a most bizarre issue on my Windows 8 machine. I could access only Google Apps in a browser but pretty much everything else could not be reached. I was the same in Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Initially I thought it may have been an issue accessing HTTPS, as the browsers stopped responding when trying to access a secure connection. But the connection to Google Apps was HTTPS.

I tried all the usual things such as rebooting the PC and the wireless router and flushing the DNS cache, but to no avail.

I did some research and came across the following suggestion from chev65 on sevenforums.com. They suggested that winsock or TCP/IP may have been corrupted, and to fix it in this way:

  1. Access the DOS prompt with administrator privileges.
  2. Enter the command: netsh winsock reset catalog
  3. Reboot the PC
  4. Again at the DOS prompt with administrator privileges and enter the command: netsh int ip reset reset.log hit
  5. Reboot again.

This fixed the problem for me.

I don’t know why the PC could access only Google sites, but I would suggest that winsock was issuing strange instructions that didn’t effect only Google sites because of the way they interacted with the browser.

 

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