Strange Behavior on XP with HTTP connections

I m seeing some strange behavior on my laptop, wondered if anyone had experienced this before.

- 10 mins or so after booting, something stops blocking HTTP traffic.
Only HTTP traffic. This doesnt happen in IE only (Mozilla also cant access anything).

-Everything else works (IMAP etc). If I reboot, HTTP gets enabled again but gets blocked after a few minutes.

- When HTTP is blocked, I can get email, IM, and even tracert to servers(like google.com etc) successfully. However I cannot ping any server successfully (I can after a reboot)

- I suspected my firewall, have uninstalled that.
- I suspected the XP firewall, have disabled that.
- I ve run 10 different spyware scans (including the tool from Microsoft) but with no results.
- Tried reseting winsock and ip via netsh but no results
netsh winsock reset catalog
netsh int ip reset c:\netsh.txt"

-I ve tried a few other things but nothing seems to work. A reboot brings HTTP

Any advice before I think about a hard disk reformat and reinstall XP clean ?

Any ideas ?


/s



PS : I originally posted this in the spyware forum since I thought it ws trojan related, but cross posting here after somone pointed out that this was more appropriate.

 

Have you taken a look at the layers service providers with LSPfix? Most of the spyware programs can't deal with those properly, including ad-aware and apybot. I'd take a look there and post what you find.