hey, I have this totally wierd problem with Mozilla on Red Hat 9 and I can't for the life of me figure it out....

Sometimes, and for no reason, it just kinda stops working properly. What I mean by that is I can navigate around this LQ page just fine, and go open google and search (my home page), I can check my email (cos it's open already) BUT links from within google won't open (in a new window or the same window) and when I open a brand new browser window and type in a URL all I'll get is [B]Resolving host www.whatever.com...[\B]

has anyone any idea why this is or how to fix it?

I am running....
Red hat 9,
Kernel is 2.4.20-20.9 and
Mozilla version is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225, build 2003022516

any help would be greatly appreciated. This is driving me mad!!

what I should say though to clear this up is that I can navigate around pages / sites I already have open but can't open new sites....

Firstly, this sounds like a firewall issue, do you use a firewall? If so, have you tried loosening the settings a bit?
Secondly, have you tried a clean profile? Rename the .mozilla folder in your home folder (delete the dot - you can rename it back if it doesn't work) and then relaunch Mozilla. If the problem is fixed, copy across your mail, abook.mab, bookmarks.html (and whatever else I've forgotten) into the new profile.

it isn't a firewall problem because I can get to the sites fine for a while. Then all of a sudden it just won't let me open up new sites, yet it will still allow me to follow any internal links from any pages I have open (with the exception of google). And if I close a window, reopening Mozilla and typing in the URL again will not reopen it. Strange....

It works again fine after I restart, as this is the only way up to now that I knew of the fix the problem - the good ol' microsoft way...

Next time it happens I will try what you suggested.

Thanks Andrew