Networking Issue with Microsoft Windows XP Home

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.broadbandnet.hardware (More info?)

A users laptop has come into my office with a particularly unusual problem.

It cant connect to any website, even though the proxy settings are correct.
When I attempt to connect to any website I get "The page cannot be
displayed". I am able to "ping" machines connected to the LAN (by name and
IP address) and even connect to them via Windows sharing. I am also able to
"ping" the machine in question from my workstation. I can ping websites if i
know the IP address but not by name(when I do I get the following error "Ping
request could not find host ???. Please check the name and try again." )... I
also done a "tracert" but this failed and stopped at the first hop.

I have tried numerous things one of which was suggested by my colleagues
which was to delete the "hosts" file which I have done but it has not made
any difference.

I would say it was a DNS issue that only seems to be affecting this machine,
but I don’t know exactly what the problem is.

Any and all suggestions will be helpful.