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EppyGA

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Let's Fly
Working on my main computer this morning and everything is fine. Went to the Nvidia site to see if there were new drivers for my video card. Downloaded and installed new driver package. Got the usual "need to reboot" message and did so. After the reboot the driver install completed and I start things up again and suddenly notice that none of my browsers are connecting, they are all timing out. Email clients (Outlook and Thunderbird) download messages just fine. Fire up FileZilla and can connect to two different servers with no issue. No DNS issues, good ping times out to Google and Dilbert. Everything else seems fine except browsing.

The computer is running Win 10. I've exhausted my current knowledge base with no solutions. Have shut down and started back up on three occasions with no change. Any ideas from the techie squad?
 
Which browsers did you try?

Make sure you don't have a proxy set.

proxy setting.PNG

Check your Windows Firewall (maybe turn it off as a test)?
 
a LOT of articles out there about win10 issues after installing nVidia drivers. trying to find a good one that might help u.
 
No proxy set, sorry should included that in the OP
Try turning off the Windows Firewall (temporarily as a test). Have you tried Chrome, Edge or some other browsers (I assume you have)? Anti-virus? You said you could ping. Are you pinging by name or IP (try both)?
 
so far all the ones I'm reading tell u to download and install a program, most will help you uninstall the old drivers and registry information. I haven't personally heard of any of these programs so I'm not gonna be the guy to recommend you run one of these and then it hoses your system. but if you've heard of any of them and trust them, they may help.
 
Try turning off the Windows Firewall (temporarily as a test). Have you tried Chrome, Edge or some other browsers (I assume you have)? Anti-virus? You said you could ping. Are you pinging by name or IP (try both)?

Chrome, Opera and Firefox all behave the same. I currently have the windows firewall off with no change. Haven't shutdown the Anti-Virus yet. Pinging by name and by IP.
 
so far all the ones I'm reading tell u to download and install a program, most will help you uninstall the old drivers and registry information. I haven't personally heard of any of these programs so I'm not gonna be the guy to recommend you run one of these and then it hoses your system. but if you've heard of any of them and trust them, they may help.

Understood Eric, I'll look around.
 
Control panel: Devices and Printers: Device Manager: Display adapters: Roll back driver.

No guarantee, but that usually works.
 
Also, try disabling WebGL in one of the browsers. Since a video driver update preceded the problem, it's worth a shot.

Rich
 
When I went back down later after working on getting part of AVG gone, the browsing came back. I continued trying to remove AVG, it's an evil little SOB. I used the AVG Remover tool and even it hasn't gotten rid of everything. Had to go into safe mode to shutdown two services still running but only got rid of one folder. I still have a folder left over that is marked read only and any attempt to change that fails and thus any attempt to delete it is no go. F'ing thing has a life of its own. While in safe mode I was at least able to disable the two remaining services.
 
When I went back down later after working on getting part of AVG gone, the browsing came back. I continued trying to remove AVG, it's an evil little SOB. I used the AVG Remover tool and even it hasn't gotten rid of everything. Had to go into safe mode to shutdown two services still running but only got rid of one folder. I still have a folder left over that is marked read only and any attempt to change that fails and thus any attempt to delete it is no go. F'ing thing has a life of its own. While in safe mode I was at least able to disable the two remaining services.

Deleting stubborn files or folders was a chore for which a bootable Linux distro used to come in handy back in the day.

You may want to run a registry cleaner (the one one in CCleaner is pretty safe) to clear up the crap that the uninstall almost certainly left behind.

Rich
 
Deleting stubborn files or folders was a chore for which a bootable Linux distro used to come in handy back in the day.

You may want to run a registry cleaner (the one one in CCleaner is pretty safe) to clear up the crap that the uninstall almost certainly left behind.

Rich

CCleaner is in my toolbox and I plan to run ti this morning. I posted on the AVG Community Forum and got a couple of replies from their tech folks.
 
I'm pretty sure that there was some component of AVG that had to be uninstalled separately. I forget what it was offhand, and I don't know if its still true.

Antivirus programs with Web content filtering are frequently the culprits when the computer has Internet but the browsers won't connect, as you've found. But when a video driver update triggers the problem, it's usually because the browsers have WebGL enabled and they can't find the updated video driver. That's why I suggested disabling WebGL. If it allows the browser to connect, then most of the time the computer can simply be restarted after disabling WebGL, and WebGL then re-enabled.

In other words, sometimes all that uninstalling the antivirus software actually accomplishes is prodding the browsers to find the new drivers once the web-filtering components are removed from the route. Disabling WebGL, rebooting, and re-enabling is usually an easier cure.

Rich
 
I know I'm probably wrong for this, but I never update video drivers. I used to but it seemed every time I did something like this happened. So I concluded if it ain't broke don't fix it.
 
I know I'm probably wrong for this, but I never update video drivers. I used to but it seemed every time I did something like this happened. So I concluded if it ain't broke don't fix it.

That's fine as long as you've read the revision notes and are sure that what's changed in the driver is something that doesn't matter to you, such as fixing some obscure bug that affected a particular application or game that you don't use. Security-related updates are much more important, and video drivers are especially vulnerable. Malware can be designed to spread through specially-crafted images that exploit vulnerabilities in video drivers.

Also, on some computers with integrated peripherals, the updates may be bundled into packages that patch other problems such as vulnerabilities in the chipset, NIC, etc. Again, reading the release notes should reveal whether this is the case.

The same applies to network-accessible devices. Network printers and MFDs, for example, can have vulnerabilities that expose the whole network, especially if the device is Internet-facing (for example, if Internet printing, scan-to-email, etc. are available on a MFD, even if you don't use those functions) and the firewall is configured to allow that access. Sometimes the updates add features or fix compatibility problems with specific hardware or software, and if you're not having those problems, you can safely skip the update. But if they fix security holes, it behooves you to apply the patches. Even if you don't use the function that contains the vulnerable code, chances are that it still can be exploited.

I make a hard drive clone and an image backup every day. When I update a driver, I just refresh them both immediately before the update. It takes about two to five minutes. If the driver hoses something and I can't fix it, I can just restore from the image, or swap the clone into the machine if the image becomes unavailable after the update. I've been doing that for years, and it's pulled my ass out of the fire several times.

Rich
 
I'm beginning to like my steam gauges more and more.

Indeed. Having seen computers misbehave in all manner of unpredictable ways, I don't trust glass at all.

Rich

Oh, do NOT get me started! I want my old mechanical knob washing machine. I despise these new fangled "smart" machines.

Let me set the water temperature manually for each cycle. Let me set the water level. Let me set the wash times, the spin speed. Let me OPEN the thing mid cycle without having to wait for some brains in there to "cancel", "drain", "reset". Stupid machine locks up and does God knows what in there. It WEIGHS the clothes? And adds what water it "thinks" the clothes might need? I have no control over any of it and I absolutely despise it.
 
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