Results of a Virus attack?
 

Hey all. I've been reckless and recently got attacked by lots of spyware and some viruses. The problem I'm having is this: everytime I try to access google.com, I get this message:

"The connection was refused when attempting to contact google.com"

I've done a lot to clear off the viruses and spyware, but I feel as though some system setting has been changed somewhere to prevent access to that domain. Google.ca works fine, so I'm wondering if anyone's had this problem and solved it.

Check your 'hosts' file to make sure that they haven't redirected google.com to localhost or something like that. You can also try google.ca as it should also be in english. The location of the 'hosts' file will vary depending on your version of windows, but anything recent should have it in (WINDOWS DIRECTORY)\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
Just open it up in notepad and make sure there aren't a whole lot of lines in there with sites you may or may not visit, the first part of the line is the ip address it's redirecting to, the second part is the hostname of the site that will resolve to the ip address in the first part.
Hope this helps somewhat...

Hey thanks Kyrin!

This problem has been bothering me for months and that fixed it! Next time I'll read the board rules and post my specs, but luckily your fix applied exactly to my situation.