Whenever I have to work on or to fix windows machines (mostly, sysadmin for friend's computers), I get really depressed. These computers seem to have a life of their own and refuse to obey me, whatever I do.

Lately, I have been trying to bring back to life a win2k laptop which happens not to be able to browse the internet with any kind of browser (both firefox and ie) although a network connection is alive and working. Typically, I can ping whoever I want, I can http to other servers on my lan but as soon as I get out of the lan, http stops working. It looks like I get half pages and none of my attempts to figure out what is going one succeeded. I am currently going through the painstainking process of removing the win2k security patches one by one but that is a bit... hrm... an unfriendly process.

Any idea on what might be wrong on that machine or how to fit it are welcome :/