No internet initially after large update

My sister's PC (I am her support person!!) has been showing a strange problem! Its a Dell with Win 7 and all updates are applied as they arrive. Since she doesn't use it all that much the updates are usually applied when she powers down and then completed at the next power up. If there were a lot up updates what seems to happen on the next power up is the updates complete without incident but when she opens Internet Explorer it cannot display any web sites. She gets the standard "Page not found" error message. Also Win Live Mail cannot connect to any server. After several restarts it usually fixes itself.

I was there on Sun when it power up and observed it first hand. Again the updates from the last power down completed just fine and when it came up, out of habit I waited for the little network connection icon in the Notification area to show "Internet Access" which it did. Then I opened IE and it said "Page not found." I tried some other favorites and none of them worked, but again the network icon DID show internet access. I also tried to get e-mail and that also did not work.

I restarted and while there were no updates to finish and the network icon still indicated Internet Access I still couldn't get to any web page. I rebooted again and finally the internet access worked as if there was no problem at all.

She says that every time there are a lot of updates this happens and I have no idea why its happening.

Does anyone have any ideas I can look into?

Thanks,
Gerry

 

Have you tried another Browser? See if it's just affecting IE. Neil.

 

That wouldn't matter as I tried other programs that access the internet and none of them can connect. For example I run Win Live Mail to get her e-mail and it comes back with an error message something like: Cannot connect to server.

Haven't tried that but in theory it shouldn't matter as when the PC is powered up you can see that the update processing is proceeding during the "Do not power down your PC" phase which displays the percentage of the update processing that is done and this process is always completed!

And what is still the main baffling fact is that the network icon DOES display Internet Access meaning that there should be connectivity to the internet.

Gerry

 

Actually I did think of that and while I was there on Sun if the multiple re-boots did not restore the internet I was going to re-boot her router which should force new, or at least renewed, IPs to all connected devices. The reason I'm hesitant is the my sister has Verizon FiOS for TV, phone and internet and she also has the "whole house" DVR system and whenever the router is re-booted it sometimes causes problems with the DVR and the boxes it talks to.

Luckily the multiple re-boots seems to work and unless I find something else I can do that will have to stay as the working solution!

Thanks,
Gerry