For 2 days I have not been able to access hotmail or MSN messenger. The error message I get when I try to log on to messenger says that I am behind a firewall (which I have been for 3 weeks now, ever since that fix was released) and my proxy settings are wrong (I haven't changed them and they haven't ever been wrong before) and I need to go into LAN settings to change them.
I tried to go to MSN and start there, and just now got it to come up (turned off the firewall, restarted, turned it back on). Can't access hotmail from there either.
So, I tried to go directly to hotmail.com to sign in there, and get that "msn search" page. When I click on hotmail from there, I get a "cannot find server" page. So I click on "automatically detect settings" and nothing. I followed the security settings directions on that page and nothing. Any other ideas? Thanks!
If you can get some web pages but not all web pages then I would suggest you have a spyware or virus proble. Use the free AVG antivirus and spybot search and destroy and adaware to check for these. Also clean out the hosts file. On an xp machine it is c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc (it is hidden so you will have to ensure you see hidden files). Open hosts with notepad and ensure it only has 127.0.0.1 localhost in it (aside from the text preceded by #). You can also make it read-only.