losing connection

[Mark I]

I have a machine with Win XP SP1. Everyone in a while it
loses the internet connection. If I type in the address
bar of IE "http://www.espn.com" it will say 'page cannot
be displayed' and it will replace the address
with "http:///?%www.espn.com". I can ping addresses by ip
or dns but cannot browse. I have Nortin Anti-virus
installed and updated the definitions, no virus.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance,

Mark

 

[selmafrog]

how do you connect to the internet - dial-up, DSL?
get the ip address of your dns server and try to ping it
when you are not able to view pages. If you can ping
using the ip address but not the URL [http://www.XXXX]
you are most likely having DNS issues - not connectivity.
Have you updated your explorer/browser? Microsoft has a
fix for "can't view pages after updating ..." issue.
check the windows update site.