Ran into this issue yesterday morning, spent 2 days doing virus & malware scans. IE7 stops working, as does all HTML references from Outlook html emails, as well as ClickOnce deployed update checks.
When entering an address into the IE7 address bar, I would get one of the 2 following messages:
"Address not valid"
"Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"
I'm not the only one with the problem, there are a lot of cries for help on this one, and there was a definite pattern to the responses,
1. Why would you use IE? Use Firefox!
2. "Problem SOLVED, I reformatted!"
I finally found my problem buried in my LAN settings. In Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections tab > LAN Settings... "Automatically Detect Settings" had gotten unchecked. I know for a fact that I wasn't futzing in around in there, and I haven't figured out what happened exactly, but re-checking that got me going again.
I don't know if I will ever figure out what happened, but maybe this post will help someone out.
Print | posted on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:57 PM