general support question

[REDACTED]

Hello forum,
I've been having some general issues and thought maybe someone else might have some ideas what I could try next?

I have been using Opera browser until about a month ago - usually had 5 windows open with average 10 tabs each.
Then switched to Chrome = 3 windows w average 10 tabs, plus... Firefox = 2 windows w average 5 tabs

Issue: every five days, all browser activity becomes blocked!
The only way to clear this, is close everything and reboot.
browser message is a generic 'can't get anywhere, try later' type of message.

Any ideas what I can try? what I could examine?
There are no relevant messages in the Events viewer.

ADD:
- am using XP sp3
- with avast! free updated
- also have ZoneAlarm firewall and SpyBot SD anti-malware running
- browser default is Chrome, plus Firefox as secondary
- email is via Eudora and generally only text-based

Regards,
James

[Theo Peterbroers]

Neighbour turns up their microwave every fifth day, which interferes with your WiFi network. Nah, they'd have to live according to some calender that has five-day weeks for this to be anywhere near plausible.

ISP resets your connection every five days, or maybe you told your router to relinquish a DHCP lease every fifth day. Is that a router setting, or does one do that in the connection settings of ones pc? I dunno.

Can you ping an outside server when your browsers cannot go online? Open a command prompt (Start > Execute > cmd), then "ping google.ca", without quotes. This should show you if the connection is still alive. If so, something blocks your browsers. If no, it's time to troubleshoot your network.

Only if the previous test was positive; if you still have Opera installed, can you get online with it when Chrome and Firefox are blocked? This tells you whether the blockade is is specific or not.

Does the event viewer (right click My Computer > Manage > Logs, I have a Dutch version of XP so labels are a guess) show anything special?

Then there are some IP commands you could try at a command prompt: ipconfig /?, ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew, there are not too many options.

Best regards,

[REDACTED]

guess I could have said I tried most of this.
yes, can ping the router and the Internet
oddly enough, there is one webpage I can still go to - Facebook (wtf?)

it's not my NIC, the router, or my ISP.
it's almost like windows is saying 'you've used all your Internet connections and can't have any more'
so I even uped the XP max for those to 500 (from less than 20) - no time change.

oh, and nothing in the Windows Event logs, no in ZoneAlarm logs, nor avast! logs

like I say, wtf?
Thanks for reading, regards,
James