Neither live.com or hotmail.com working or pingable. No malware found.

[jft135]

I ran into an interesting program this morning. I have a business customer that has his outlook setup to check his hotmail account. As of Sunday, he can't send or receive messages and can't login to the webmail.

I tried the most obvious things. Manual virus check, TDSS Killer, GMER, Combofix, HijackThis, Malware Bytes, etc. all clean. Winsock reset, Norton & McAfee Removal tools multiple times, flush DNS etc. Nothing. All hardware diagnostics come back clean, all drivers updated, clean Hosts file, reinstalled network driver, still nothing.

The funny thing is, all other computers on the network can connect. If I go to login.live.com I can connect, but hotmail.com and live.com do not work. Pinging also doesn't work to either address or pop3.live.com or smtp.live.com.

I am totally out of ideas. Any tips?

[shamrin]

That's not much to go on, but if you're looking for ideas I would say look at DNS and maybe your HOSTS file. If you're getting host not reachable from PING I doubt that has to do with a virus as they normally are watching port 80 and not dealing with ICMP packets AFAIK. What do you get when you pick hotmail's IP directly? Does hotmail even respond to pings?

[Tepin]

Are the ping requests timing out or is the host not found?

I just blocked bing.com at my firewall see what would happen, for mine it's obvious at least. Big banner that says the site is blocked by my firewall. Pings
just time out.

[Vicenarian]

random idea; but have you tried a different browser?

[jft135]

Originally Posted by shamrin

That's not much to go on, but if you're looking for ideas I would say look at DNS and maybe your HOSTS file. If you're getting host not reachable from PING I doubt that has to do with a virus as they normally are watching port 80 and not dealing with ICMP packets AFAIK. What do you get when you pick hotmail's IP directly? Does hotmail even respond to pings?

I've tried several different DNS providers and replaced the hosts file with a clean copy. Hotmail and Live aren't even responding to pings. Using the IP makes no difference.

random idea; but have you tried a different browser?

Yes. I forgot to mention that Firefox can find the sites, but neither Outlook, Internet Explorer, Telnet, or a ping can find them. That's what is so strange. I've even uninstalled and reinstalled IE and run office diagnostics. I'm starting to wonder if their old IT guy is pissed at them for firing him and he did something.

[johnrobert]

When I have a major problem like this I nuke sooner than later (Catastrophic network sockets corrupted)
When you consider all the time you have spent so far , and you would have to go this route anyway

Other than that if its XP I would try a repair