First, can I thank all you guys for your comments on this forum. Without all the contributions, everyone feels on their own.

We are a System Support company who look after small and medium sized companies. We don't have to tell our clients not to use Vista, they tell us! Amongst our hundreds of users, we have one Vista machine. No FD in any of our clients'companies wants Vista on their site.

However, we need to run it and use it for training. We have had two experienced users using it ....but they are going back to XP Pro asap (Yes, both have the browser problem). Vista reminds us of ME all over again.

Enough slating the product (though I don't see why anyone should spend good money on Vista Ultimate and have to beta test it for Microsoft - campaign for free Windows 7 license for all Vista buyers).

The reason for posting is that I have experienced this problem for months now. Ping, vnc, telnet ....virtually any other port is fine; http on any browser locks up. I've tried nearly all the remedies offered here (including the links to half-open). None of them work for me. (I agree with the suggestion that it is a dns issue within Vista - Vista just loses all DNS for some reason).

However, today, is the third day without the problem happening. What have I done? Turned off the sidebar and all it's gadgets.

Now, I'm not suggesting for one minute this resolves the issue, but http connections from all these gadgets appears to exacerbate the issue for me. This was no more apparent when I turned the sidebar on last week and down went the browser.

If anyone does get to the bottom of this, please post.

Cheers