IE says 'Connecting', Mozilla will not load, Chrome OK
 

I have fought this for a week now. IBM Thinkcentre Tower with XP Pro svc
pak 3.

A.) IE8 will load but just says Connecting forever (Never brings up the
diagnose connection)
B) Mozilla gets about 10 seconds of hourglass and then nothing.
C) Chrome loads and works OK, programs that do autoupdate can get updates,
Outlook Express Mail and Newsgroups work without any problems.

I read tons of information on this and remedies generally say two things.

1.) Remove all Norton Symantec products, use the Norton remove tool.
2.) Remove the most recent auto installed fixes from Microsoft

I did both of these things, removed about 20 fixes. NO change. I had
forgotten about Chrome and decided to give it a shot when all else failed
and it worked fine, no issues.

It seemed like things began to slow down about 3-4 days before and then
slowly ground to a halt. I did all kinds of virus, malware etc scans with
zero results. Another computer on my network had no internet access
problems of any kind.
I can ping, tracerte and nslookup from command line with no problems.


What would keep IE8 and Mozilla from working and let Chrome, Outlook Express
etc work flawlessly?
Any help would be appreciated.
TIA Puzzled