my wife turned on her computer today and went to get on the internet and she got the "this page cannot be displayed" message so she asked me to fix it. so I went about the usual process of attempting to repair the network connection. only when I ran the repair tool it wasn't able to even renew the ip address. so I went into the network connections properties to check its connectivity and the connection wasn't sending or reciving any packets. now the computer is connected with CAT-5 to our router, which my computer is also connected to via CAT-5, and the router lights are on. so it recognizes that the computer is connected. I used windows support to try and figure this out but the only thing it came up with was possible winsock corruption. but i checked winsock the way that microsoft says and there are no corrupt files. also my hamichi connection does send and recive packets, though the amount of packets are few, so I'm at a complete loss. since networking isn't my thing I decided I'd turn to the most talented people I know. so if you can help, please I'm going crazy over here. 

Sounds like the rotary couplers might be rubbing to close to one another.  I would make sure they're at least 3mm apart.

not to sound stupid but What?!?!?

Just kidding!!!!! hehe

you're a dork!

ShadowWX, my mom recently had internet problems that were similar. She was connecting to a router via ethernet. It turned out to be a bad network hookup (built-in to the motherboard) AND a bad router! I'm thinking she may have had a slight power surge or something. I turned off the onboard LAN and put in a spare network card. Then I hooked that up straight to the modem (she has Verizon DSL). It ran fine. If you have a spare card lying around, try installing that first.

i think it's rather odd that i just fixed a local guy's situation with the exact same symptoms yesterday.

He was using the big ass Actiontec router Verizon FIOS gives you.  The wireless completely stopped, the internet light went amber, and it stopped handing out IP addresses.  Windows Xp would auto-assign itself the 169.254.x.x address.  We replaced the router and all was back up and running again.  Before swapping, i tried a different cable and port on the router, as well as power cycling and resetting.

The router itself appeared to have just died.  The clients left for about a week and when they returned, the router was in this condition.  I wonder if you have the same Verizon provided router.

no I have my internet through comcast and i just bought a new lynksys router about a month ago plus my computer is hooked up to the same router i've even tryed switching the ports and that did nothing.

I got myself a WRT350n, greatest money I ever spent.  I loaded ddwrt on it and setup some optiware packages, my router handles all my BT downloading to a attached NAS, does a few other things too, its worth checking out.

I still say it's his rotary coupler!