Cannot connect to the Internet

Okay, my colleagues and I have done a little research on this problem and have come up empty so far. Here is the problem: within our company are a number of laptops that are experiencing problems connecting or staying connected to the internet. Sometimes they will connect, but only for a max of about 10 minutes before they are kicked off… Doesn't matter if they're using IE or FireFox - we've tried both. Also, some of them are on a domain within our company, and some are not. So it's NOT a networking issue, or a problem within the company. One oddity -> a secured site will connect every time… Also, even though a connection cannot be made, we can successfully PING the site in question (ie, MSN.com)… All of the computers have basically the same applications installed, whether on our domain or not… Searching for viruses has proved unsuccessful - nothing has been found on any of the machines in question. Unistalling, re-installing and /or upgrading IE hasn't solved the problem either… The fact that this is occurring on more than one computer really has us stumped!!! I suppose I could run and post a HJT log from one of them, but not too sure if that'll be useful or not… Anybody have any ideas or solutions?? We are really desperate!!

The fact that it is happening on more than one computer does suggest a networking problem. The biggest question left unanswered in this post is if the laptops are connecting wirelessly? If they are, bingo, you found your problem. Try hard wiring a laptop for the time being to test. If the connection is intermittent, you may appear to have successful pings, but they may be sporadic with jittery response times, or intermittent dropped packets. It may also appear that some sites load occasionally, while others fail. I'm not entirely convinced that all your HTTPS sites are working, and that ping is always working. Can you verify that by trying an extended ping test. Use the -t parameter to perform a continuous ping test over a period of several minutes. Watch for lost packets and uneven response times. However, if they are wireless as I first mentioned, you need to focus on that, it is almost certainly your problem. Multiple wireless access points, interference, problematic firmware, etc. can cause network issues such as you mention.

Thanks for the reply, appleoddity… I tend to disagree with you about the network problem, though… The problem happens whether the computers are on our network or not… We've tested them numerous ways - going through our network, going out via a DSL line, or wireless… All 3 scenarios have the same problem… We'll try the extended ping on Monday when we get back to work…