Okay, I've been stumped again. I was helping someone with their computer, and they were asking me about online backups. The told me about this program they'd heard about called Carbonite. I hadn't heard of it so we went to check it out. The site wouldn't load. It would just sit there for a few minutes, until IE finally gave a "Page could not be displayed" error. The strange part is that the title would load (in IE's title bar), but nothing on the page. The following is all the information I have:

• she says she's had this problem on other sites, but most pages load just fine
• her husband's computer, which is on the same router, can get to the site and has never had this problem
• I could ping carbonite.com and get responses
• she was using IE, so I tried portable versions of Firefox I have on my USB drive, same thing
• tired clearing cache, temporary internet files, etc.
• ran two spyware scanners and a virus scan
• looked through Hijack this and didn't see anything suspicious
• disabled Windows Firewall
• tried uninstalling and reinstalling the network adapter
• tried a few command line tips I found on the net like ipconfig /flushdns, netsh winsock reset, ipconfig /registerdns

Nothing worked. No matter what I did, that page simply would not load. Any ideas?

MTU size. Just try reducing it to something like 1000 and see if it starts working. If it does, you know that's the problem and you can optimize.

What version of Windows is this?

MTU or TCP "receive window" size negotiation -- broken on some machine between you and the web server.

A couple of years ago I encountered a problem like that, when somebody changed the Linux defaults to favour performance over tolerance for such broken routers.

-ml