Can't see captchas! What the...

spookymuffin

I have no idea what happened, but for some reason, I can't see captchas. I don't think I'm a spam bot, but I'm asking just to make sure. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. I've tried on Firefox and IE8, cleared browser caches in both, updated Java and Flash, restarted my comp a bunch of times, and I still can't see captcha images. Any ideas?

Last Son

Are you using an add-on that blocks javascript?

Alt: What sites can you not see captchas on, maybe the site is borked.

spookymuffin

All addons have been disabled. The problem is on multiple sites. Other sites are loading slowly. For instance, this page is still loading as I type this.

I ran an AVG and malwarebytes scan, and they both came up negative.

spookymuffin

I noticed something strange while looking around for a solution. My browser seems to hang up connecting to api.recaptcha.net and google-analytics.com. When I try to ping these sites, I get request time out on both of them.

Orogogus

Are you running Peerblock or some other program that can block traffic from outside the browser? Your firewall, router and HOSTS file would also be places to look.

Hevach

Check your hosts file (in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ - the file has no extension, but you can open it in notepad). Some antispyware software (SpybotS&D for one) redirects a ton of crap to 127.0.0.1, and I had this break video sites, captchas, and a few forums as well as the ads it's supposed to. The only thing that needs to be in there is the 127.0.0.1 localhost.

spookymuffin

Problem solved...

The hosts file was clean, and I'm not running anything to block or filter anything. I opened up the msconfig utility and set it to diagnostic startup, so there is absolutely nothing running but Windows services.

I ended up unplugging my router and modem for 10 mins and starting them up in connection order, and that fixed it.