When surfing the internet I can only access the Google home page. No other pages will display, and I cannot even do any Google searches. The internet connection is definitely live, as I can receive email. Recently I have been receiving messages saying my computer has registry problems, but these appeared to be some form of spam so I did not respond to request to download software to fix the issue. The computer is running Windows 2000, and I have both Spybot and Ad-Aware installed.

Since you can only access the Google home page, and cannot access anything else (including the ability to conduct searches using Google) it is possible Internet Explorer cannot access any websites, and the Google home page you see is a cached version of the page, which is located on your local computer. There are some procedures we can try to fix this problem. Firstly, check whether your ISP requires users to define a proxy server in your Internet Explorer settings. Most ISPs use a transparent proxy server, whereby all HTTP (web) traffic goes through the ISPs proxy server, even though the user does not define a proxy server in their web browser settings. However, some ISPs require the proxy server to be defined in the web browser settings, and without this setting you will not be able to access any websites. On the other hand, having an incorrectly defined proxy server in your web browser settings may also prevent you from accessing the web. So you will need to confirm the correct settings with your ISP.

Assuming the proxy settings are correct in your web browser, if you have any third-party firewall software running, temporarily disable the software to check whether the firewall is causing the problem to occur. If this solves the problem, your firewall may be misconfigured causing your web browser to be denied access to the internet. Make sure the program control settings in your firewall allow your web browser access to the internet. Also, if you are running ZoneAlarm there is a tricky setting which may be causing the problem. Open ZoneAlarm and click the ‘Firewall’ page. At the bottom of the page, click the ‘Advanced’ button. Enable the options ‘Allow Outgoing DNS/DHCP in Trusted Zone on High Setting’ and ‘Allow Outgoing DNS/DHCP in Internet Zone on High Setting’. Click OK. Click back to the ‘Overview’ page to ensure the settings have been saved. If this setting is not enabled, DNS requests may be blocked, preventing access to websites using their domain names (e.g. Google.com) as these domain names cannot be translated into the relevant IP address (e.g. 123.123.123.123).

Should the problem continue, we need to determine whether the issue is related to Internet Explorer itself, or to the network connectivity on your computer in general. To test this theory, you can try using a different web browser to see if the problem persists. Download and install Firefox from www.mozilla.org/products/firefox. Configure Firefox according to how your ISP requires web browsers to be configured (in particular, the proxy setting) and try to access the web using Firefox. If you can access websites using Firefox, the problem seems to be related to Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is quite difficult to fix given its integration into Windows. You can try running the Windows 2000 System File Checker. The procedure is similar to that for Windows XP (as described in the question from Ron) except you should run the SFC from the command prompt. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘cmd’ (without the quotes) and click OK. At the command prompt that appears, type the following command:
sfc /scannow [ENTER key]

In the event you cannot access the web using either Firefox or Internet Explorer, there is a problem with the network connectivity on your computer itself. This would be a strange scenario, since you are able to still send and receive email. In this case, please contact me for further instruction.