There are many possible reasons that contribute to the situation where Internet Explorer could not access the Internet even though there was a working internet connection tested using other means. This article focuses on a common situation where this happened after a personal firewall or some parental control software was uninstalled forcefully or in an incomplete manner. After cleaning up the remains of the uninstalled software, Internet Explorer still could not connect to any web page on a successfully tested internet connection.

The solution is quite straight forward. You only need to reset the winsock protocol. After you click on the [Start] button followed by [Run] and typing in "cmd", the command you need to type and press [Enter] is

netsh winsock reset

This would bring internet explorer back to life again.