I'm having similar problems to other people but can't find a solution yet... I have Internet working fine on my desktop at the minute, and until recently it was working working on my laptop.
For some reason about a week ago it just stopped working on the laptop, and no amount of restarts or plugging/unplugging cables has an effect. I know the connection is OK because if I connect it back to the desktop it works straight away.
In my laptops network connections it shows Local Area Connection with the 'network cable unplugged' error constantly, but when I connect it to my Internet at home (for the rest of the year it is on my University network) it comes up as Local Area Connection 3 and says it is connected. However, the 'network cable unplugged' error stays for Local Area Connection, and disabling this has no effect on the Internet working.
The strange thing is that when it is connected MSN messenger will work and I can chat fine on it, but at soon as I open IE it loads the error page. So there must be some connection there but I don't understand why it won't load IE at all.
I have also tried system restore to a point before it randomly stopped, but this did not solve the problem.