Certain websites never open

I have a problem whereby my new windows 7 machine can connect to the internet, but will not open certain webpages.

So for example I can get to Google (or this forum), but when I try Firefox web browser | Faster, more secure, & customizable | Mozilla Europe the browser seems to connect but the page never displays - the browser just says it's transferring data (in ffox 3.5).

I get the same result in IE or Firefox, and the same problem with different Windows 7 laptops - in fact I just sent back a dell inspiron because I thought the fault was with the machine, just got an acer aspire and got exactly the same problem.

I have an old dell running xp and that has no problems whatsover using the same network.

I have tried connecting directly to the router rather than over wireless and that makes no difference either.

I've tried disabling windows firewall and that doesn't seem to have helped.

There are no errors or messages.

Help!

As you are unable to access the site with different browsers and different computers, surely that is an indication of a site problem.

I clicked on your link, only to find a blank page, using Firefox 3.6Beta5. I then clicked on it three or four more times, and each time I accessed the page. The last time I did that, I pressed F5, to force a reload from the Internet, to ascertain if my seeing the page was simply from the FF cache. The modem lights blinked, the page reloaded from the Internet.

There, now that I've solved the problem for you....

Thanks for the response but the problem occurs with many sites (as another example I cant get to the dell support site - Welcome to Dell Support), and isn't related to browser caching.

No problem with Dell Support. Something's wrong and/or is blocking access, on your computer, but I've no idea what, sorry.

Try opening a command prompt and using this string... ipconfig /flushdns with your browser closed, and then attempt to access the sites you couldn't...

Another far-fetched possible cause, a Host file with lots of blocked sites.

Windows/System32/drivers/etc/Hosts

Hi - I've tried all of the above and no success. I've found that the if connect to the internet on someone else's router then the problem goes away so I'm now thinking something to do with my router and windows 7 (since my xp machine works fine, but both windows 7 machines have the problem).

I can ping the problem sites. I kind of thought that would be the case - I thought that the browser was connecting to the site but never finishes the download - this proves that there is some connectivity (thanks for the suggestion). Dont know if this rules out the router as being part of the problem or not thought.

There must be a logfile (ie, firefox, windows?), somewhere but I dont know where to look or how to enable it.