Internet Is Down / i.e. MSN won't load
A weird occurrence for a Friday afternoon....I had two independent users in completely different departments call me within a half hour of each other complaining that "The internet is down". That, in and of itself, is not all that atypical. However, the ACTUAL problem ended up being msn.com was set as their default homepage and wouldn't load; in the case of one user, in both IE and Foxfire (sic).
I tried a plethora of fixes (flush dns, disable protected mode in Flash, disable all web browser plugins, ping msn.com to make sure it is resolving, on and on). The final solution was to use the Reset Internet Explorer Settings option for IE and Creating a new Firefox Profile for Mozilla Firefox. I will list steps for both below, but would also like to ask anyone who may see this to leave a comment if they have run across the same thing and what your final solution (if you found one aside from mine) was.
Reset Internet Explorer Settings
2.) Next, go to the Advanced tab and click on Reset
3.) Finally, you will have to choose whether or not to Delete Personal Settings and then choose Reset. If you are worried about losing anything I would suggest trying it once without the Delete Personal Settings option and, if you continue to have trouble, then go the more onerous route.
***Note: after the reset you will have to re-configure any special active-x settings, default homepage, etc; as the warning implies.
Create a New Firefox Profile
1.) First make sure that Firefox is closed
2.) Open a command prompt and navigate to Firefox's install directory
3.) Launch Firefox from the command prompt with the -p option
4.) Choose Create Profile
5.) Choose Next and then enter a name for the profile, optionally choose a folder, and then flick Finish.
6.) You will be brought back to the following screen where you can then choose to launch your new profile. You may want to uncheck the Don't ask at startup box while troubleshooting if you will need to flip back and forth between profiles. Once, you are done troubleshooting and you want Firefox to load directly into a profile, just re-check that box.
***Note: These steps can be used to fix many other weird issues with your browsers, but I am still baffled as to the actual root cause of the MSN issue in this case.
I tried a plethora of fixes (flush dns, disable protected mode in Flash, disable all web browser plugins, ping msn.com to make sure it is resolving, on and on). The final solution was to use the Reset Internet Explorer Settings option for IE and Creating a new Firefox Profile for Mozilla Firefox. I will list steps for both below, but would also like to ask anyone who may see this to leave a comment if they have run across the same thing and what your final solution (if you found one aside from mine) was.
Reset Internet Explorer Settings
1.) First, click on the Settings gear in the upper right of the IE window and choose Internet Options
2.) Next, go to the Advanced tab and click on Reset
3.) Finally, you will have to choose whether or not to Delete Personal Settings and then choose Reset. If you are worried about losing anything I would suggest trying it once without the Delete Personal Settings option and, if you continue to have trouble, then go the more onerous route.
***Note: after the reset you will have to re-configure any special active-x settings, default homepage, etc; as the warning implies.
Create a New Firefox Profile
1.) First make sure that Firefox is closed
2.) Open a command prompt and navigate to Firefox's install directory
3.) Launch Firefox from the command prompt with the -p option
4.) Choose Create Profile
5.) Choose Next and then enter a name for the profile, optionally choose a folder, and then flick Finish.
6.) You will be brought back to the following screen where you can then choose to launch your new profile. You may want to uncheck the Don't ask at startup box while troubleshooting if you will need to flip back and forth between profiles. Once, you are done troubleshooting and you want Firefox to load directly into a profile, just re-check that box.
***Note: These steps can be used to fix many other weird issues with your browsers, but I am still baffled as to the actual root cause of the MSN issue in this case.
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