I went to help out with an HP PC this morning which had been running slow, but otherwise working fine. A trial of Norton Internet Security 2010 was installed on the PC, and I went to my usual routine of uninstalling it in order to put Microsoft Security Essentials on instead.

After the restart, I found that the PC could no longer browse the web. Internet Explorer would respond "Website contacted, waiting for reply" in the status bar. I attempted to ping out to various computers. I could ping another computer on the local network, and I could get a ping back from google (but no web page.) I could still browse the internet just fine from the other PCs.

I began my investigation, and tried out the more standard methods for resolving the problem. I tried:

• Running the Norton Removal Tool
• netsh int ip reset reset.log
• netsh winsoc reset catalog
• repeating the above a few times in various orders
• Verified that there is no proxy set in the Internet Settings in the control panel
• Tromped through the registry, removing any reference to "Norton Internet Security" or Norton at all.

Other interesting symptoms:

• the broken machine can ping working machines, but not vice versa.

I tried resetting the Internet Explorer settings to their defaults. However, this was the strange part: the reset hung at the "Applying default settings" arrow, and never progresses.

Because this was an HP machine, there seems to be no windows 7 CD. However, there is the recovery partition. I'm wary of using it, because I haven't used one before and don't know how much or how little it will do to this PC.

Any thoughts?

Update 2

Answers to questions:

Are you connecting wirelessly, or connecting directly with an ethernet cable?

In this case, it's actually a desktop. It's connected via cable.

What are you getting for an IP address and DNS server?

The IP address is one in the right range assigned by the router that we have between the modem and our network. a 192.168 address. The DNS server information matches what we have for the working PC.

Do any alternate browsers work normally? This will determine if there's a problem with just IE or a problem with connectivity.

Chrome fails to connect to the internet too, with the same kind of error. Other applications such as windows update and other applications that try to access the internet also fail to connect.

Update 3

Check the Network Adapter

Checked. It says it's enabled.

Run the Windows 7 Troubleshooter

Ran. It tried to connect to the internet to get a troubleshooting pack, (failed?), then couldn't detect what the problem was.

Pinging Google, connecting directly to the IP

Google would respond to a ping, but bing wont. Yahoo replies with a ping, m-w.com does, most places seem to respond to a ping.

Update 4

Thanks everyone for their suggestions. Turns out this wasn't Norton's fault…this time; it was coincidence. See my answer below for the final solution!