>Hi All, something very weird going on, when I try to run any of my local web sites from either VS or IIS I get a Yahoo page not found page, I don't even use Yahoo - this only started happening about an hour ago and to my knowledge I haven't changed anything - any ideas ?

In some browsers you can specify a default search site/engine to handle "not found" errors. So, instead of getting an immediate error, the browser hands the URL over to the designated search so it can have a go. If that site also fails to get a result then you typically get a page of that site with a "not found" message.

This used to be more common when there were more "branded" browsers out there e.g. IE or FireFox "provided by Yahoo". With some of those branded browsers it was difficult or impossible to remove or change the secondary search.

So, if you've specified an "error handling" site to be Yahoo, or you're using a Yahoo-branded browser that might explain what you're seeing. You say your local Web server isn't working so any attempts to access local sites will fail, regardless of whether you use DNS or you bypass it by using the IP address.

I believe some ISPs use a variation of this: If a DNS lookup fails, it returns the results of a search on an engine of the ISP's choice. But, you would see this only for lookups that use DNS, you would not see it if you used the local IP address directly.

If a local web server has stopped or fails to restart, there should be events logged in the System or Application event logs.