Hey guys and girls ive noticed this issue cropping up sporadically throughout your forums with no set cause or solution ive tried alot of fixes perhaps someone can help

running XP SP2 all current updates relativily within a few months anyway
using ZoneAlarm Security suite
regularly run adaware fully up to date
use firefox and ie problem identical for both

up till 2 days ago everything was perfect now i cant access past the login screen of hotmail and i usually cannot access www.ebay.com.au at all although sometimes i can get it to load it times out at login every time though

since encountering this problem i have installed and fixed all problems hijack this showed anything unuasual i mean i didnt wipe my registry clean heh
ive run the online scan ewido which actually found some old virus's and a trojan which was kindof scary i know ZA is useless as virus scanner but its still a good firewall
anyway ive cleared the cache of ie and firefox reinstalled firefox twice ive rebooted the computer around 3-4 times refreshed ip cleared dns with flushdns rebooted router several times ive installed and run spybot as well rerun adaware with more updates ive tried with ZA off and on

my network topology is
broken pc
....|
switch ----------- router---laptop
....|.......................|
other comps...........net
(the dots are just to get spacing right)
switch connects several comps to router
router is connected to internet
router can also connect the laptop seperate from the switch

all wired cat5
the laptop can access ebay and hotmail with no issues ive removed the switch and replaced with a backup switching router with no sucsess ive put the laptop into the same switch as the non working computer and it can still access ebay and hotmail with no issues

the only change of the last few days i can think of is i updated firefox to v2.0.0.4 but it was several days later that a problem occured so it seems unrelated and i doubt it would affect ie in the same way anyway

ive checked netsh and there are no blocks on the hotmail or ebay domains or any ips in there being blocked all other internet traffic works as far as i can tell with some errors sometimes i can login to yahoo but i cant delete messages sometimes i can use bitlord search on google login to muds play warcraft 3 with no issues

oh yea i have adsl2+ not speed limited at the moment no bandwidth problems and as i said before everything works just those 2 sites cookies are working in other sites perhaps ebay and hotmail use a more specific action thats being blocked but once again i should be able to go to www.ebay.com.au with 0 issues regardless of cookies and anything else

ahh addendum i could not post this message from the broken comp either so perhaps the problem is something to do with the html method for posting data to http server anyway have at it

grateful for any help