Vista - Ping but no internet.

So I've had this happen to me before but usually a restart or system restore fixes the problem. Well, not this time.

I was using my computer fine at first but decided to restart since I've had it on for 100 hours without a real shutdown (I was using hibernate). When I rebooted I was unable to access the internet using any programs such as IE, ff, msn, etc.. but I was still able to ping Google and get a <100ms response.
What happens when I open IE for example is that it simply says that it cannot connect to the internet. When I close it I get "Internet Explorer is not responding" twice in succession. I then get a warning telling me that it was blocked by DEP. So I disabled DEP and restarted but I still had the same problem just without the DEP warning.

This is very annoying because this is on my uni laptop and I need to use these programs almost daily in and out of class, so reinstalling is a last resort option. I'm currently running a previously installed version of Ubuntu on the same machine with no problems with the internet so I can eliminate any possibilities of it being a hardware problem.

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated

Well I've resolved the problem.

What I hadn't realized at first was that I could use the 64-bit IE fine but any 32-bit programs would not work with the internet. After doing some research I ended up at this site. It seems that there is some problem with winsock that made it impossible for 32-bit programs running in a 64-bit OS to use the internet.

The site linked to this fix on the Microsoft site. You can either use the manual method or just use Microsoft FixIt to have it automatically fix it. I used FixIt which quickly fixed my problem. After a restart everything was back to normal and I was able to connect to the internet using all of my programs.