Vista - Browsers are not getting pages

On my vista desktop, I've had some problems. It seemed as if access to the outside network was being very slow. It appears to have slowed to a stop, where no pages are being delivered.

Same problem with Firefox, IE and Chrome.

I think it is not a hardware problem (network card, cable, router.) [ Boot from Live CD with Knoppix ran a close to full speed, using Speakeasy - Speed Test http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ ]

Under vista, most machine only actions work normally. Network wise, ethernet plugs blink at a normal rate, "ipconfig" reports a normal dhcp address with DNS connectivity.
I can ping outside sites or other machines on the internal network.

When I load (attempt to load) any page ( Google ) dns resolves to an address, but only the pages elements from cache will load.

In an attempt to identify the problem I disabled the firewall with only a slight impact (now the cached items and apparently the web page title are delivered.)

I tried to use each of the three browsers to fetch the web page for my side of router (Router Admin) http://192.168.1.1 with no activity. so the problem exists with addresses both inside of my router as well as outside of it
The other three machines (2 XP's, and Linux) can both see the Router Admin pages as well as outside pages without a problem.

The other users of that Vista machine do not have administrative controls on that server, and I normally don't use that machine at all. (I'm using my company supplied laptop, for most of my activity.)
Network shares from each of the machines are visible to the other machines including printer shares, so I don't think that it is a network issue or a router issue.
Other network traffic seems to work, but not the browsers. However RDP isn't working either
The problem seems to be common to all three browsers, so I don't think it's a browser specific configuration issue.
I think (i may be wrong) that it is a vista configuration issue.
I disabled the firewall that I could find, but something else must be blocking the traffic. I re-enabled most of the network related services in the idea that some service necessary to basic traffic had stopped. No web browser visable impact

What can I do to isolate the errors, and figure out a solution. Is there something that I'm missing [well obviously i must be missing something. ]

I haven't touched the Vista in 3 days. today I logged in and I could get simple pages however the speedtest (see how fast is your browser thread) shows my effective speed on the vista machine as

344 kbs download and 37400 kbs upload.

I think there is a problem with receiving traffic rather than sending it.