HP Laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 2.
Problem affects IE8 and Firefox.
When attempting to browse most web sites, browser loads web site title in browser's title bar, then displays "Waiting for site url" and never completes loading the page.
Able to connect to www.google.com with no problems.
Unable to connect to www.carbonwy.com, www.wsj.com, www.cnn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.
Other PCs on same subnet are all able to connect to these sites without any problem.
nslookup resolves all of these sites without any problem, so DNS does not appear to be the problem.
Windows Firewall is disabled.
Norton 360 was previously installed but has been uninstalled. No other firewall software is installed.
IE8 Protected Mode is off. IE8 advanced settings have been reset. IE8 user settings have been reset. After reset, IE8 tries to connect to http://hp-laptop.aol.com and go.microsoft.com but same symptoms persist. Title bar loads, then nothing.
System has been restarted numerous times.
Running out of ideas. Please help!