Some weird internet failure

Seems like my computer is having difficulties accessing websites.
More than once it happened to me that I tried to go to a site and it gave me the page cannot be displayed screen, only to be able to access the site after a refresh or two.
now though there're certain sites I can't go to at all, because it just doesn't find them (and i know they exist and i already accessed them before).. Now it even redirects me to the msn search, except that it gets overrun buy a redirection to some search engine.
This led me to believe i might had a virus, particularly melicious spyware or a trojan, but I checked and the resoults were negative.
Doing a ping check ends in an unknown host message.

Any idea what might cause this?
I'm running win 98SE

 

Nah, this is not a Virus behavior.

However this is a Free and very Good Virus Scanner.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download955.html

And try this:

Download DrTCP:
http://www.dslreports.com/front/DRTCP021.exe
Run the program, it will show the current settings of TCP/IP parameters. Write them down.
You can change any variable that you want, click Apply, and reboot the computer, if no good; you can always change to your original values.
Start with:

MaxMTU - DSL =1492 Cable = 1500 ISDN=1322 DialUp = 576

Tcp Receive - 256960 (This is the varaible to play with!)
Window Scaling - Yes
Time Stamping - No
Selective Acks - Yes
Path MTU Discovery - Yes.
Black Hole - NO
Max Duplicate - 2
TTL - 64
Notice it said above Start with
These settings are not written in "stone" there is variability depending on the computer other setting. So try few setting and measure your Download for each setting.
In addition, in case a person has a Router the Router's MTU if set differently can affect the general MTU.
Link: Measuring the "Speed" of Internet Connection.

 

Ok I'll try that thanks.. But is it possible that there's some program that prevents me from going to sites properly by blocking communication? I don't have a firewall I'm actially suspecting some melicious program.

 

That is the behavior of a browser hijacker. Download HijackThis and have a look here:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/vb/showthread.php?t=26149

And it would be wise to run at least a software firewall, ZoneAlarm is a decent one.

 

Well that definetly helped me with the browser hijacker, but did nothing for the bigger problem.. It still can't find the specific sites I have problem with... And those are only those specific sites.
Got any more ideas? Because I'm clueless at this point.
BTW one of the sites began to work suddenly, but the ping test still gives me the unknown host message.

 

Are you saying that you got the hijacker problem fixed?

If so and your still experiencing problems you may have more than one issue at play here. I would suggest referring to cat5e's post.

 

Hmm.. Well I did the tests as suggested, I optimized and downloaded a movie from Blizzard's site. It downloaded the downloader in 30kbps, the movie itself was downloading in an average of 18kbps, reaching 22 at times, which is not bad i believe.
I still think the problem may not be the connection speed but that something is preventing it from detecting what it's supposed to.. i noticed the same problem in KaZaA too, every one of my downloads is in 'searching' state and it never finds users to download from.