Hi, I have already solved my problem, but maybe someone else will find this useful.

My problem was that internet explorer and firefox would not load up any pages, although i could still use msn messenger and view websites through a bittorrent client.
My firewall was set to allow these programs.

I noticed that my antivirus (Avast) was dissallowed web access in zonealarm. (dont know how that happened)
I enabled web access for avast and my browsers now work as normal.
spybot s+d and adaware se personal are showing my system as clean.

Hi powertortoise,
Glad you got it fixed.
also many thanks for taking the trouble to report back on your success.
Anyone with a similar issue will be able to look up your fix and hopefully it will work for them as well
regards
paws

No problem. It was the least I can do after you people helped me to remove the errorsafe hijacker over a year ago.
Thanks again.

OH HALLELUJAH! .. Thank You!!!!!!
I have had problems with both of these for the last two weeks and couldn't work out what I'd done wrong ... obviously one of the updates on Kaspersky.. my "protection" had disallowed them and it was driving me nuts! Even rolling my system back didn't seem to work!! I even bought IE7 again cos I couldnt download it using Yahoo.

I really appreciate you posting that solution as I was beginning to get frustrated!!

netts xx

Thats the power of forum's instead of personal mails............

Thanks for your input, and glad you could use the info provided

Regards Abydos