firewall configuration.

[ShagDevil]

saint-francis,
Not sure if your NIC is bad. Could you tell me what two NIC's you have? I'm not entirely sure what your setup is. In any event, let's see if you're getting any DNS resolution at all. Type this into the command prompt: ping -a 216.109.118.74
The next line down should say:
pinging p11.www.dcn.yahoo.com [216.109.118.74]
The reason I'm asking you to do this is simply because I want to see if DNS resolution is taking place at some point. I'll keep working on the issue with you. Thanks.

[saint-francis]

So I started using the other nic. I disabled the one I was using before ( the one built into the MB). According to the device manager it is an Intel 8255x-based pci ethernet adapter (10/100). The one that I am now using is a realtek rtl8139 family pci fast ethernet nic. The box is an IBM MPRO w/ 2 550 ghz pentium 3's, windows xp sp2, directly wired to the Westell 327W. The os was a clean install and format the day that I tried to run zonealarm. I haven't really tinkered with it too much since then. Just installed what's necessary to get by using a computer as a school/internet/media center.

This is turning out to be very informative for me. I am learning a lot just to keep up with what you are suggesting I do (not the commands, but what they are pointing to).

Thank you for all of the help.