Internet connection just stops working after five minutes. Symptoms, you cannot get to any web pages, no matter what you do; however, you’re able to ping, tracert and receive an IP address. More than likely what is happening is that there are remnants of an old firewall program still stuck on your computer? Possible left over registry entries from attempting to remove a firewall program such as Zone Alarm or CA EZ Trust Firewall. In my case, it was EZ Trust Firewall. I had removed whatever spyware was on this client’s computer, cleaned it up real nice, but the internet would just stop working after exactly five minutes. I attempted winsock fixes, etc, nothing worked. I finally caught on when I realized I saw this little pop up from my task tray that said something about my EZ Trust Firewall was disabled. I started searching through the registry and sure enough, there were still lots of entries with EZ Trust Firewall. I removed MOST of them thinking that was enough. I rebooted, waited, same thing happened. Then, I thought, perhaps if I reinstall the program I can uninstall it properly. Nope, you have to pay for the program or re-sign up using your Road Runner account e-mail address and password – something I did not have access to. So, I went back in, and found one more entry of EZ Trust, the only thing weird was it was under a Zone Alarm key. I just decided to delete it anyway. Reboot, wait, bam, internet works again after five minutes. Case closed.
i have been fighting this for a week. i am trying what you said and will let you know. boy i hope this works!!
I tried everything. Mine went silly after I tried to install a USB2 PCI card and then, on top of that, my ISP dropped cable internet and TV for several hours.
The first thing I did was to remove the PCI card. In one slot it would not allow the machine to power down and in the other it would stall on boot sequence. I replaced the old USB1 card which was hard-wired to the motherboard.
By the time I got internet back, it would log on from boot, then hold the connection for about 5-10 mins, then suddenly drop it, although bizarrely, I still had email. Not only that, my laptop, which used a wireless connection to my router, was functioning perfectly.
At the behest of the ISP technical support I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, disabled AVG Antivirus, removed a piece of spyware detector but all for nought. 40 minutes of telephone advice and all he could tell me was that I had a software conflict.
I disabled just about every damned thing I could find and went into the registry editor, found all the remaining ZoneAlarm entries and deleted them. Zip. Nada. Still malfunctioning.
A more knowledgeable friend called by. We tried installing Opera browser but not dice, so in the end we reloaded ZoneAlarm and, VOILA, it suddenly worked again and is working now. Just to be on the safe side I have disabled the router firewall to stop potential conflicts with ZoneAlarm.
I have absolutely no idea what the hell was wrong. All I can say is that all is now right with the world.
As was said above, case closed.
I’m researching the EXACT same problem right now. Eerily, I just purchased Trend Micro’s security suite and stopped using Norton’s.
I will do complete uninstalls and then a registry crawl.
This sucks!