Hi all,
some real weirdness going on with my laptop. Ive got a Sony Vaio that has been good to me for over a year. I run XP with AVG, SpyBot, AdAware, and Windows Defender & Firewall. Yesterday I was browsing over my hotel's wireless net when Firefox suddenly could not find any pages. I tried Chrome & then IE, same thing. Skype & Yahoo IM still work, so I suspected some sort of DNS prob. I flushed DNS, renewed IP, but no joy. I went to Safe Mode & could browse just fine (but on a really small window!). I ran my AVG & SpyBot and only came up with some cookies. Also ran CC Cleaner, just cuz. Back in Windows proper I still can't browse with any of the 3 clients.

Any thoughts on what to do next??

Have you tried disabling your firewall? If it works, then you'll need to allow an exception for whatever is blocking it.

Also, can you browse when connected to another network?

Sorry, forgot to mention that I did disable the firewall with the same result.

I don't see any open networks in the area to connect to. The weird part is I can connect and surf just fine in Safe Mode, so I doubt it's their network that's jacking with me. The hotel has 2 wired workstations in the biz ctr & I'm gonna try to go hardline to see if I can browse. I've thought about a corrupt driver, but then I wouldn't be able to surf in Safe Mode either.

Well, a corrupt driver is possible. When in safe mode, you are using the most basic element of your machine. So if you had a newer driver that has been corrupted, the one used in Safe Mode might work.

Try disabling all of your security applications, since it looks like you have a few of them. If the problem goes away, begin enabling them one by one. There might be something that is interfering.

I'd skip ad-aware and replace it with Malwarebytes instead, they catch much more than ad-aware ever has for me. I would lean toward it being some sort of malware that is causing the problem as many of them won't work in safe mode. Maybe download and run hijack this and check through the results log for anything that shouldn't be in your system?