I hope someone knows something about this problem because I'm at my wits end and may have to reformat my drive and reset everything to factory settings with my recovery disk.

I have windows 7 64 bit and recently had most of my shortcuts on my desktop disappear as well as my files in my documents and who knows what. I then restored windows to a previous date and everything came back. Except I lost all my settings and no favorites and no cookies and no anything. I plugged through and got several programs running but everything is like starting from scratch.

Anyway to fix some programs I needed to download them again. I have IE 8 and when I try to download any program at all I get the message

"Unable to open this internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

The only supposed fix I could find said to go to the Tools/advanced and uncheck the do not allow encrypted files but it was already unchecked.

If I can't get an answer I suppose I'll just have to use the recovery disk and start from scratch with a new installation.

Which particular sites? Are all sites blocked? Have you tried to download another browser like Firefox? Is that blocked as well? If you turn your firewall off can you then download?

Given the damage to your system and the error message received, make sure that the drivers for your phone or cable modem and other necessary hardware are working correctly. Reinstall to be sure.
You clearly are not making a good Internet connection. You need to be sure that hardware, the browser, and your ID, password, and connection format sent to your provider are all correct.

There is no reason to assume that IE 8 itself is the problem.

There a couple of suggestions on the site below -

Unable to open this Internet site.

In addition to making sure hardware drivers are installed and trying a different browser such as Firefox, make sure you aren't infected with malware and/or a virus. If you did a System Restore, you may have simply reinfected your computer.

Run Malwarebytes a couple of times in addition to your antivirus program. Flush all your Restore Points and create a new one once you are sure you aren't infected.

I doubt IE is your issue. Reinstall drivers, make sure it's clean and then worry about getting your programs. Try Firefox or Chrome as another browser until you get it all straightened out.

There are viruses and other malware that prevent you from accessing the Microsoft website. My brother caught a virus that not only prevented Windows Update from working, but also deleted explorer.exe every time we tried to download a Microsoft update manually. When explorer.exe is missing, you won't get desktop icons and it looks sort of like Windows didn't finish booting.

Virus and other malware often hide in System Restore Points and reinfect shortly after you go back to the Restore Point.

Another possibility is that your hard drive might be going bad,
so running a chkdsk /R or chkdsk /F might be a good idea. It might be a good idea to run chkdsk from a Windows CD instead of from the hard drive in case your computer is infected with malware.

Once you know for sure that your problem is not with your hard drive, it's probably quickest and easiest to reinstall Windows. You've lost all your settings anyway.

If you don't want to reinstall, I'd suggest trying the Kaspersky Rescue Disc. You download the iso, burn it to CDR (burn it as an iso -- don't just copy the iso file to the CDR), then boot from it. The first thing you do is download all the updates, then you scan with it. It cleared up the virus that had infected my brother's computer, though we did find a few files with weird names that we had to delete manually.

I had the virus, too, when I couldn't get Internet Explorer to open as well. (Google Chrome worked, though).

As I remember it, I went to another computer - at work, I think, and downloaded a file from the windows site that repaired internet explorer 8.
(don't windows 7 come with IE 9 automatically).

many years ago, I had to reformat my harddrive, lost a bunch of things, very annoying. I, couldn't connect to the internet either, untill it dawned on me. The driver to my netcard needed to be installed. Thankfully, I got help from the company, I bought the computer from.

Whenever I do a full anti-virus check, sometimes the viruses hide in system restore. It's a pain in the proverbial neck, but sometimes you'll need to turn off system restore.

I think I have made a system disk check after booting my computer up in safe mode - by hitting f8 when it starts up again after it has been re-started.

I want to thank everyone for their responses. I was unable to fix the problem and it kept getting worse because there were many programs that I had that I just couldn't open and couldn't replair so I finally bit the bullet and slapped in my recovery disk from Dell.

The disk has now been formatted and returned to factory settings I've redownloaded my drivers and everything is working fine. I did lose a lot of files because I was a couple of months beind on backing them up. Lesson learned back up files that are important more often.

Good news is that the computer is purring like a kitten now until I get it overloaded with [blip] running in the background again. (Hard to keep from doing that)

Hi John
Glad to hear that it's purring like a kitten again.

Cathy

Sometimes that's the easiest way to get rid of an infection and you get a nice "new" computer to boot. Now run those backups and your anti-virus often!

And just about the only way you can be sure it's gone, since malware has gotten very clever about hiding in several files and having delayed reinstalls so you can't be sure where it's coming from.

A fresh install also fixes any irregularities in the registry and any broken files.

Good points; in the end it's the only way to be completely sure you're clean.