Laptop having weird internet connection problems

[kermit1986]

I have a laptop connected to the net wirelessly through my Linksys WRT54GS router. Anyway, the laptop has been connected fine in the past, but over the last week. It's been acting up...

It's my sister's laptop, so maybe she did something but I can't see what the problem is.

It'll connect to websites fine, but it won't connect to msn messenger or googletalk.
I've tried opening the ports on the router (even though it never required me to do this in the past), but that didn't help.

When I do the connection test thing in Msn messenger's options it says "error with the default gateway" So It's most likely to do with the router but I can't see how as my PC (this one I'm using at the moment) connects to msn fine.

After looking around, I think the problem has something to do with TCP settings, but I don't know where to go about changing settings for the TCP.

[kermit1986]

Anyone know of where I might want to look to solve this problem?

The laptops running XP (I think it's automatically kept itself updated so it should be on service pack 2 I think). I'm googling the net and reading other forums but I'm getting no relevent answers

[kodmaster]

try disabling the firewall... I think that she blocked MSN from accessing the internet

[kermit1986]

did that, it didn't work.

I had ZoneAlarm on her laptop, and that totally disabled the Linksys usb Broadband reciever thing from getting anything to the laptop I believe, because nothing (Firefox, IE, Msn, or any other program that used the internet would connect).

Also, I turned windows firewall on, that didnt help, and turned it off, and that didnt help either.
Seems to be a weird problem, I might just reboot her laptop with the XP disk and hope for the best.

[mbossman2]

before you do that, go back to a restore point (if one was made) that is dated prior to the problems...see if that might resolve the issue rather than starting from scatch.

[kermit1986]

I'll try that out now, should've thought of that myself really.
Thanks for the advice.

[kermit1986]

Tried that, for some reason it goes through the process of restoring then restarts and pops up with the message of 'Your computer cannot be restored to the restoration point'. I tried 2 different restoration points from different days. 1 was from a random Windows Upgrade, the other was from a System checkpoint. (These where from the only 2 days available to restore too that where before her msn went botched).

Edit:
Also, just to note. I have 2 threads floating about at the top of this board, but they are for 2 seperate problems. Just incase anyone was thinking I was spamming the board or anything like that. I was just bump-ing both threads to the top to update my status with the problems etc.