Bizarre problem I've encountered on someones windows 7 system, only internet explorer(32-bit) will connect to the internet, firefox doesn't load any pages, 64-bit ie doesn't load anything, newly installed chrome doesn't load any pages. Applications which connect to the internet work fine. I've uninstalled any antivirus programs and firewalls and yet the problem still persists. The settings are correct in the networking tabs of the browsers, no proxy or anything. There seems to be no apparant cause to this issue! 
