Hi all,
Posting this in case it helps others who run into the same frustrating issue.
**Problem:** linuxmint.com was completely unreachable on one specific Windows laptop, while every other device on the same network (same subnet, same gateway, same public IP) could access it fine. No block page was shown — the browser just timed out.
**Symptoms:**
- DNS resolved correctly (nslookup returned 192.124.249.53)
- Ping worked fine with 0% packet loss
- Traceroute completed all the way to cloudproxy10053.sucuri.net
- TCP connections timed out on both port 80 and 443
- netstat showed SYN_SENT, meaning packets were leaving the laptop
- No SYN-ACK ever came back
- Connecting via iPhone hotspot worked fine
- No proxy configured, no hosts file entries, no Windows Firewall rules, no Winsock LSPs, Defender Network Protection was off
**Root cause:** Corrupted Windows TCP/IP networking stack on the laptop.
**Fix:** Run the following commands in an elevated command prompt (Run as Administrator), then reboot:
netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset
netsh advfirewall reset
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
After reboot, also run:
netsh int tcp reset
Then reboot once more. After that, linuxmint.com loaded immediately.
Hope this saves someone a few hours of head-scratching!