>Later versions of Windows use DNS extensively so it's not surprising a bad DNS entry could cause something like this. DNS resolutions get cached locally; if you make a DNS change you may need to issue
>

>ipconfig /flushdns
>

>from a CMD window to flush the DNS resolver cache and force the system to get fresh DNS results.
>
>Another thing to be aware of is changes to DNS while using a VPN. A couple of times when I've been connected to a VPN, I've noticed my DNS requests get serviced through the VPN connection and its configured DNS servers rather than my local connection and DNS servers. Some discussion of this at http://superuser.com/questions/392269/prevent-vpn-from-changing-dns-on-windows-7-8-developer-preview .

This is impressive. Thanks