Webshorts connection to Internet

This is my friend's laptop, Toshiba with Windows XP home. She has been able to connect to the Internet before to download or send e-cards etc from Webshots site. But now none of the links seems to work. I looked in options, put an exception for webshots.com in Windows Firewall, disabled AOL spyware, reinstalled the Webshorts after uninstalling it, etc. But none of them seems to work. Any suggestions as to how to access the Internet within the software? I use a dsl connection. That's working fine otherwise.

I would appreciate some help.

Moorty

 

Look in your hosts file and see if you can find one or more entries for the website in there. Delete any lines that are related to the webshots website.

You'll find the hosts file in the windows\system32\drivers\etc folder. There may be more than one with hosts in it's name. The one you want is named just plain hosts without any extension. It's just a text file so you can use notepad to open it and delete anything you may find that's relevant.

 

Thank you Zander:

I looked in that file. It contains no mention of Webshots in any form. So, the problem must be elsewhere.

After the instructions there is just 'local host' with a domain ip address for it (127.0.0.1). That's all.

Moorty

 

Open a command prompt window and at the prompt type "ipconfig /flushdns" without the quotes and press the enter key. Note the space between ipconfig and the /. Then see if you can access the site.

 

Hi Zander:

I flushed the dns successfully at the command prompt. The links still did not work.

The error message when I try to open a link says: "unable to open hyperlink. There is no application associated with the given filename extension. "
Moorty

 

Oops! I think I've been misunderstanding. Until your last post I was assuming that you were getting a page not found error. But from the sound of the error message this is something different. So, have a look at the thread I've posted a link to below and try my suggestion in post #14 in the thread. This may get you going again. Good luck.
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=39931&highlight=url%3Ahypertext

 

Hello Zander:

Thanks to your reply. I pursued some of suggestions you have made in the thread and one of them worked! It had to do with resetting the defaults in Programs and also checking (which didn't make any difference, maybe because AOL uses its own browser) and unchecking again of "Check to see whether IE is your default browser.

Now the hypertext links in Webshots are all working and leading to IE.

I still have another problem about the display drivers not working, but I will try to solve it myself.

Thank you very much for your help.

Moorty

 

Ok, glad to hear it's fixed. Only wish I would have realized a bit sooner what we were dealing with but I guess that's kind of the way communicating on the net can be at times. Doesn't really matter as long things turned out ok in the end.