Internet Unreachable

I am working on a Dell VOSTRO 1700 running Windowx Vista SP2. The system suddenly stopped being able to access the internet through a browser. I can ping any known address on the Internet such as Yahoo.com, Google.com, etc. I can not get a browser to connect to the Internet. I also can not get the browser to connect to the local router at 192.168.1.1 It does not say Address Unreachable, it says Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage. Same thing with Firefox. AVG, SpyBot Search & Destroy, and Malwarebytes are loaded for anti-virus protection. However they can not reach their servers to do updates. I have checked the hosts file, and at first the /windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file was FULL of web addresses pointing to `127.0.0.1 Also, when I ping localhost, it uses ::1: as localhost. I have edited the hosts file and removed everything except localhost 127.0.0.1 and am now able to ping localhost correcttly. I am not able to modify the lmhosts file as it seems to be locked. I can not edit it to make changes. Even after modifying the hosts file, and rebooting I still can not get a browser to access the internet. Yes, I've checked and rechecked "connectivity" in the browsers, etc. Can anyone give me something else to check? I don't want to have to reinstall Windows just because the Internet doesn't work. That seems to be my only option at this point.

Try booting to Safe Mode with Networking. See if the browser connects then.

If yes, then something is starting a boot time that is causing the problem. You can use msconfig to isolate the problem. I can post more specific directions on doing this if needed.

If not, try resetting Vista TCP/IP winsock: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/18/r…log-corruption/

Back when I was using Vista, I had a similar (but not identical) problem with network connectivity. I spent several frustrating hours trying to fix it, then I noticed that the problem started soon after I had updated my WiFi drivers through Windows Update. I rolled the system back to the state before the update and everything was fine again. Turns out that the supposedly better driver MS pushed through updates messed up something. Never figured out what it was (didn't have the time) but system restore did fix it.

Thank you both for your responses. I decided to go ahead and load Windows 7 though, and I am happy that I did. This system runs MUCH better with Windows 7 (Mojave) than it did with Vista (Longhorn). There were not a lot of files to be saved so it was faster and I didn't want to "revert" to an earlier version or restore point just to have it happen again with another update. Thanks, and ciao.