My nephew's laptop hasn't been able to get online since he tried connecting to the Uni network.
We've connected to the home network here just fine - he's seeing the router, the router's seeing him.
However, any attempt to use an online app - Messenger, IE, Firefox, Safari - and it's failing.
The Win 7 troubleshooter has more or less shrugged it's shoulders and said 'Dunno mate, ask someone else'.
His Windows Firewall was disabled when I looked - it's back on now.
The MSN Messenger assistant thingy checks off a list of things, gets as far as 'Key Ports' and fails. It was doing this since before the firewall was reactivated, though.

Any ideas? He swears he's not been tampering or installed anything he shouldn't.

If he's had it on a Uni network in halls, he's quite likely had to change some settings such as giving it a fixed IP or similar. I would want to make sure all the connection settings are set to 'automatic' in IE etc.

That's the thing, he tells me it's never successfully logged onto the Uni network.
Most odd. Why he's not thought to harass the Uni support, I have no idea...

Are the DNS settings correct? No proxy or anyfink? Have you check for proxy nonsense in the web apps?

Just to follow up on this - I couldn't see anything untoward with it. He's back at Uni, and I've told him to harass their computer monkeys - although they tried passing the buck by saying they couldn't touch it as it was still under warranty.

He'll most likely have to connect to a proxy, and probably register his MAC address to the uni servers. It's odd though, at Aber they at least serve a page which passes links to such FAQs, rather than just giving an error page...

Of course, altering software settings is a surefire way to invalidate the warranty. Imbeciles.

There is a function key on my daughters new Win 7 lappy that switch's internet connectivity On / Off. Could it be as simple as that ?

I dunno - it was connecting to the network here just fine, but any attempt to get something loaded from out there didn't work. MSN Messenger's troubleshooter seemed to think there was something up with the ports. I'm suspicious though, as the Windows Firewall was down, the Norton trial he was using had ended and I noticed McAfee was also lurking on there.
Ach, he's at university. He's there to learn. It'll do him no harm to figure this one out for himself.