Problems with Citrix/broadband proxy

I am a newbie (not completely green but, when it comes to networking, I have only very limited knowledge).

My broadband provider in the uk is Virgin.net

I frequently have to use financial applications (Bloomberg.com or Morgan Stanley's internet site ms.com) from my home PC, connecting to these sites using my broadband provider. The applications try to connect to the Citrix servers at e.g. bloomberg. In the past I had no problems, but recently, I have been unable to make the connection and get this error message:

"Cannot connect to the Citrix MetaFrame server. Proxy settings failed. The configured proxy did not answer."

I also had other related connection problems to other hosting sites, which also complained about proxies (one site allows a limited amount of free video downloads per day and kept on telling me that I had already exceeded my quota, when in fact I had not downloaded anything. I checked the FAQ and it mentioned that this might be due to my service provider using an 'invisible proxy' - I have no clue what a proxy is, but I put two and two together and surmised that my broadband provider/his proxy settings might be the source of both problems)

I would be very much obliged to anyone who could explain to me how to go about resolving this problem, or at least in helping me identify what is/could be wrong?? Many thanks in advance - Adam

 

I dont have your answer but food for thought. IP's are usually chunked geographically. Meaning a range of IP's offered by your service provider has been blocked due to abuse, hacks, spoofs ect.. Again I'm jsut shooting from the hip but I do know for a fact that whole subnets will be filtered by major financial institutes due to continued problems from that erea of the world. I could be way off but its something to think about.
With that said, have you asked any friends, neighbors, family if they could access those sites from your town/city. If they can I would start looking at your browser, ensure it has 128 Kb encryption for one. Try a differnet browser, opra or Mozilla and lastly beat up your service provider and find out if anyone else they offer internet access to is having the same problem.

Good luck