It had lasted for over two weeks and was driving me nuts...with 50-75% of EVERY web click responding with nothing happening and browser finally declaring "can't connect to this site" even when already connected and just changing pages. Only after several refreshes/reloads would the site finally load. Problem was happening with both browsers (IE8 & FF) and also independent of web site and time of day...same problem with all sites. Acted like a choked up bandwidth trying to emulate a Los Angeles freeway at 4pm on a Friday! Meanwhile, POP mail was working fine.

After doing everything I knew how to do, including a raft of suggestions offered by various techie forums, plus not finding any evidence of anyone else having the same problem, it finally occurred to me that it must be my local Verizon DSL server experiencing some kind of weird failure mode - weird because digital circuitry failures are normally total, not partial or intermittent. So, next step was to call Verizon support which, to my surprise, hasn't been outsourced yet, plus I got right through to an obviously knowledgeable tech who had me back working like a champ in less than 30 minutes...you'll never guess how! After having me power down my modem and router, he set up to send me a new (dynamic) IP address on powering them back up...and bingo, that solved the entire problem!

Asking if he could explain it, he didn't have a good one...said something about an interaction with the DNS server that he wasn't sure he understood either (plus I had already been to the free DNS I use and hadn't seen anything on their web site that related), so I guess it was mostly experience with the IP change working for him before. Whatever, I was hugely appreciative for his experienced expertise, not to mention what a delight to click and have a page rendered within a few seconds again (vs. often several minutes before)! LOL

Point of this story is just to pass on FWIW to any of you who may run into a similar problem in the future...if all else fails, remember this solution! LOL

--whit