Recently my Internet has been acting badly. Basically, I can only load certain sites. Some sites work great, and others don’t load at all. I think this is because some firewall or antivirus thing.
How this came to be.
About 3 weeks ago, I made the upgrade to Windows 10. When this happened I was prompted to uninstall my Anti-Virus (Symantec EndPoint Protection), I was told it was incompatible (ultimately it just needed an update). I performed the uninstall knowing I could later re-install it. Once the upgrade was complete, I opened a browser and noticed many websites did not load, however I was able to reinstall the antivirus program. This didn't resolve the issue.
What I know.
- The sites that load all are sites that I have visited in the past.
- Not all of the sites I have visited in the past load.
- Probably not a network issue, doesn't affect other devices, and I have the same issue when I tried it on a mobile hotspot.
- Doesn't have to do with network adapter, tried it with 3 different ones, all using different drivers.
- Some sites will load but only if you get to them in weird ways, for example from a url or link only some you vids will load, but from those videos you can navigate to any YouTube video.
- Same issue on all browsers I have tested, Chrome, Edge, IE. But Chrome will load some sites that Edge wont.
- Chrome gives me “Error 138 (net::ERR_NETWORK _ACCESS_DENIED)’, chrome says it has to do with some kind of firewall
What I have tried.
- Disabling windows firewall and antivirus.
- Temporarily disabling SEP (AntiVirus)
- Search file contents for urls that work (in case there is some sort of whitelist) but only in file explorer.
- Running windows network troubleshooter, which says nothing is wrong.
All of these had no effect.