Losing internet connection after few minutes (5-10 maybe)

Question

I took a computer that was not updated for months. Internet was working just fine so basically, I updated zonealarm, avast and installed all windows updates and especially SP3. After that, when I reboot, Internet works fine but after few minutes, Firefox says that the connection was reset. IE does not work either. However, my connection is still up and running as I can make a ping on www.google.com for example. Here are the solutions I tried with no success so far:

1) Uninstalling SP3;

2) Uninstalling IE8 and IE7;

3) Manually setting DNS and IPs;

4) Removed proxy settings from Firefox and IE;

5) Restarting DNS and DHCP related services;

6) Reset TCP/IP with netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt;

7) Updated my ehternet card driver;

8) Restarted, tweaked all the connections in any directions and any configuration possible I believe;

9) Disabled Zone Alarm and Avast;

Also, update kb981793 always fails on install.

Please, help me as I spent two days already on this and I cannot find any solution. If I cannot fix this problem tomorrow, I will have to format-reinstall everything.

Thanks for any help.

Regards.

Answer 1

I've seen this behaviour before on machines. Both cases it turned out to be ZoneAlarm. Not sure why those specific machines and not others. Very strange.