The strangest phenomenon I have ever seen

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,
On one of my home networks, on a gateway computer, yesterday all of sudden I could not access gmail or make any searches using google through either Firefox or Opera. I would write a word in the search field in google, press Enter and wait forever without reply. I could browse the net normally. I could ping google. But trying google search or gmail ended in nothing.
However, on the same computer, I could easily make google searches or enter gmail using IE.
And on the client pc, I could also easily access google search or gmail with any browser.
I disabled firewall and it did not help.
I uninstalled Firefox and removed the profile, reinstalled, it did not help.
I uninstalled Opera, deleted all remains manually, reinstalled, it did not help.
All the while, everything worked perfectly on the other pc.
I deleted all firewall rules, tried system restore.
Nothing helped.
And then, this morning, everything came back to normal.
This is absolutely the craziest thing I have ever seen in my computer life.
Has anyone ever encountered this, can explain this, shed any light, anything?
Mrk

[Peter2150]

Hi Mrk

I've learned when stuff like that happens I shut down and leave everything until tomorrow. I had a graphic's card get nutty one night. Primary monitor went to sleep, and it switched the primary monitor functions to the secondary monitor. At first I thought it was me having messed up something, so I booted into a FDISR snapshot that hadn't been updated. Same problem. At that point I was convinced it was hardware, and it since it had been a long frustrating day, I just shut it down. Next day it was fine, and that was 3 months ago and haven't seen it since.

Had a similiar issue with my laptop with same result.

Who knows.

Pete

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,
I hardly slept at night from confusion and anger.
I almost broke the pc to bits.
But like you say, mysterious are the ways of the Bitman.
Mrk

[trickyricky]

Yeah, I've seen a similar thing too, and just left it in the hope that it would go away. It did.

I was testing out a web server program. After I'd finished, I uninstalled the web server and deleted the data directory. However, when I fired up Firefox and typed in "localhost" it tried to access a site on the web. I checked my hosts file and localhost was there, I tried IE and Opera and they correctly tried to connect to the machine's loopback address, yet Firefox insisted on trying to access this unreachable external web site. From a command prompt, trying to ping localhost correctly resolved to 127.0.0.1. I even purged the machine's DNS cache, just in case. Rebooted the PC as part of the server uninstall, but rebooted it again anyway, to be on the safe side. Mystified, I switched off the PC and did something else.

The following day, all was behaving correctly again and I never discovered why Firefox was misbehaving as it did.

[Franklin]

A fella over Ccleaners is having some weird stuff happening with Gmail and FF.

http://forum.ccleaner.com/index.php?showtopic=4917&st=0&gopid=36690&#entry36690

[ErikAlbert]

Mrkvonic,
Your software must have been over-heated, that happens with hardware too sometimes. :)

[sweater]

That's also what happens to me, there are times I could not access my gmail acct. Even if I use the firefox extension gmail notifier. I couldn't figure it out. Gmail looks elegant, sophisticated and more faster than yahoo (maybe) and their ads corresponds to what your email is visiting frequently...and I was beginning to like it but with the problem like that I have no other choice but stop using gmail. I just then realize that gmail was not yet a final version and still in their betas. Maybe, I have to wait till it becomes more stable and easily accessible anytime day and night. :blink:

Yahoo mail and mail.com for me is much more reliable, and they are proven and tested and can be access without any problems unlike gmail. 8)

Maybe, I misunderstood the problem. I am just referring to my gmail experience and not on my computer hardware.

[TOMxEU]

It happened to me as well, I couldnot access Gmail, neither google search, I had to use MSN.
When I have asked in Gmail forum, they replied to me, that Gmail is still beta, so it can happen.