Youtube not working in IE or Firefox?
I have had this insane problem for over a year where youtube would not work in Internet Explorer or Firefox on one particular machine. In both browsers, the youtube website looked like crap (as though CSS was not rendering) and it whenever i tried to play a video, a message appeared indicating that I had to install flash player or enable javascript. Based on things i had seen mentioned in many posts on the interweb, I fiddled with all sorts of settings, updated Java, updated Flash player, updated Shockwave player, uninstalled Quicktime… nothing seemed to help. Something else i saw mentioned a lot was that Norton, or some firewall system, or some ad blocker, or some popup blocker, was blocking ytimg.com. Well, i knew for a fact i had no firewall software running on that box, no ad blocking, no Norton anything.
Then today i had a brainstorm — What else could cause ytimg.com to be blocked? a hosts file entry to deliberately redirect requests, perhaps? YES, sure enough, i had pointed s.ytimg.com at an unreachable local private IP address, a very long time ago, and had completely forgotten about it.