Dude!!! the EXACT same thing happened to me today too..

I spent a long while futzing with it, then said screw it and used a different mail server..

Watching closely for the good word

 

Rich - are you?

I've seen it before where someone at work could not print. Turns out that his firewall software thought an attack came from the print server and automatically blocked it without telling him.

 

Dave: nope, zonealarm was not in service.

I gave up and blasted my HDD and reinstalled everything over. sucks but my experience with MS OS is that "it's a good thing to reinstall everything once every 6 months"

Even if nothing new was installed the damn thing just gets slower and slower and slower...

 

i was going to say that you should activate your firewall. then make IE get permission to connect. once you grant permission, turn off the firewall again and it should work.

but now it's sort of beyond that point

 

I follow the same philosophy.

 

A teacher of a Microsoft class I took said that Microsoft recommend a rebuild at least every 9 months. Mine usually gets rebuilt every 6 months.

 

of course, many problems appear due to rebooting for software "fixes". I try to keep my machine up for as long as possible...if for some reason i have to shutdown, i cross my fingers and pray that it will come back the way i want. hibernate works pretty well.