Page cannot be displayed messages

[W C Hull]

Can someone help me?

A few, definetely a minority of the sites I visit such as HOTMAIL.COM,
PCWorld, PC Magazine, etc have blocks of data on the screen which says that
"Page cannot be displayed. I'm wondering if this is a problem with my
system or whether I have myself so protected from spyware, etc that the
pages not being displayed are somehow flagged so that they cannot be
accessed. I asked for help on another forum page and was told to switch to
Firefox. I would rather stay with IE.

Any suggestions anyone might have would be appreciated.

 

[W C Hull]

This is a follow-up message to m original post....

In response to suggestion given to me on another forum I went ahead and
dowloaded Firefox and gave it a shot. In IE 6.0 the blocks on the page show
informational messages that each say "Page cannot be displayed". When
looking at the same page in Firefox the blocks are simply blank, as if
nothing was occupying that section of the page. Any help from anyone would
be appreciated.

 

[W C Hull]

It turns out that my problem was the Hosts file on my system. I had been
running Ad-aware and Sypbot for some time without problem. I then tried the
Microsoft Antispyware beta and around the same time tried WebRoot's
Spysweeper. I believe that one of these two products modified my Hosts file
by filling it with common advertiser on the web and this is what was causing
the problem. Most of the links to the missing advertisments were on the
list. I contacted Webroot about the list and they indicate that they don't
modify the Hosts file so my suspicion is that Microsoft's beta was the
problem child.

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This is a follow-up message to m original post....

In response to suggestion given to me on another forum I went ahead and
dowloaded Firefox and gave it a shot. In IE 6.0 the blocks on the page
show informational messages that each say "Page cannot be displayed".
When looking at the same page in Firefox the blocks are simply blank, as
if nothing was occupying that section of the page. Any help from anyone
would be appreciated.