I followed the instructions that were given following my question on how to get rid of pop-ups, however after I installed Ad-ware and Spybot, I cannot access the internet on my home computer, I get the "page unavailable" message.
I have since uninstalled the software, but still cannot access the internet. Does anyone know what I can do about this?

jt, June 2004

Spybot can, if configured to do so, block certain websites that are known to be a threat. It can be configured to allow access to individual ones, if you wish to risk it. It can put these websites into your hosts file(A windows system file). I would have thought uninstalling would have removed these, but perhaps not, since I have never uninstalled Spybot, I don't know. What version of windows are you running? If XP hosts file is c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc. There are anumber of hosts files in there. You want the one with no extension. Open it, and if any of the sites you can't visit are there, similarly configured to this-

127.0.0.1 www.mysite.com
or
0.0.0.0. www.mysite.com
you can delete them, or put # infront of the numbers to have the file ignore them. Close the file and click yes to save the changes. DO NOT SAVE IT AS ANYTHING ELSE. THIS FILE, WHILE NOT CRITICAL WILL NOT WORK WITH AN EXTENSION!! (eg hosts.txt)

profhig, August 2004

It sounds as though your PC is not using your modem properly. Microsoft have a page here http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290766 which may help.

Tim W, June 2004