Thanks Icedrake, I appreciate your input, but this has been the situation for something like a year now, and I keep giving it an occasional try, but with no luck.
Even the Opera forum couldn't find a solution. (The last time I checked)
Wonder what would happen if you reinstalled the operating system and started from scratch. Maybe you have already done that and still Opera doesn't work? That would be weird. Maybe it's not your computer at all maybe it's the ISP. That's stretching it but you have to start looking at the slightest possibilities now since you tried everything else.
Even tried launching it with AntiVirus and FireWall disabled, which was quite a safe thing to do because I couldn't get online.
I've really tried everything possible. I've reinstalled since it started happening, although not for this reason. I've obtained older versions of Opera, still no go.
And the most weird thing? When I first came here in 06, I tried Opera and it worked. That was the first and last time it did.
I really don't care now, but I'm curious to see if anyone else has encountered the same thing.
So far I seem to be the only one. I should get some sort of award, or maybe a booby prize.
The only thing I can think of is to make sure Opera isn't using any Proxy in its network settings area, i.e.; allow it to have a direct connection to the Internet.
I don't remember what version it was but Opera all of a sudden stopped working with the ad proxy filtering software I was using, which ended up having me migrate to Firefox which turned out even better because AdBlock Plus is ten million times better than the old ad proxy filtering software I was using so I dumped that in favour of AdBlock Plus.
I reinstalled Windows sometime around the middle of last year.
The only thing I can think of is to make sure Opera isn't using any Proxy in its network settings area, i.e.; allow it to have a direct connection to the Internet.
I don't remember what version it was but Opera all of a sudden stopped working with the ad proxy filtering software I was using, which ended up having me migrate to Firefox which turned out even better because AdBlock Plus is ten million times better than the old ad proxy filtering software I was using so I dumped that in favour of AdBlock Plus.
I've got a direct connection to the Internet, and almost every application I have that has a "check for update" feature, launches my broadband connection with no problems. Opera is the only one that will not connect. Pretty cool for a Browser.
I've also tried every other browser that I've ever seen mentioned on here. And no problems.
I also tried Humpty's suggestions this morning. Flush DNS and LSP Fix. The latter finding no problems.
Give up chaps, I have. But I'm still curious to see if I'm the only one who has a unique, collectors item Browser; a Web Surfer that refuses to go into the water.
What happens when you open the browser? Do you have it set to go to a home page or does it open a blank page (that's currently my configuration. I just type in the site I want after clicking "new tab"?
I would have suggested using Regseeker to search your registry using the term "Opera" and try to manually clean out all references, but I just took a look at my Zsoft Uninstaller installation log, and noticed that Opera installed a load of registry strings. Many are in areas of HKLM that have no reference to Opera and would be very hard to find. That's why I find to hard to believe that Revo can actually find all these registry strings that appear to be otherwise unrelated.
When you uninstalled Opera, before reinstalling did you make sure all references to it were deleted in your Documents and Settings folder?
When you run the program, do you see Opera.dll and Opera.exe files (using Sysinternals' Process Explorer)? Have you tried running Hijackthis when Opera is running (and when it's closed)?