The strangest phenomenon I have ever seen

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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.

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.

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

 

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.