Connection Refused
I’ve been fighting with a computer off and on for the last week, trying to get it to see the web when the owner dials Earthlink. First I cleaned up the adware and spyware (collectively dubbed malware by me). I disabled Windows XP firewall, yada yada, this and that, specified DNS, tried different POPs ("point of presence,” which is the same as saying “I tried various phone numbers from that ISP"), tried modifying the (clean, surprisingly) hosts file to see specific sites via IP address, cleared the browser cache for both IE (Internet Explorer) and Firefox (which I had installed), disabled the helpful Earthlink utilities, disabled everything connected with Norton, and so forth.
Eventually I got it to work by purging the DNS cache using ipconfig. Duh. Should have thought of that sooner.
Yet Firefox still gives “connection refused” when trying to go to, well, anywhere.
Now that is a curious problem. Which I plan to try eliminating by purging and reinstalling Firefox…
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