opera and ie wont open urls (prob solved)

I just got a new notebook recently, a compaq presario 2145US to be precise. I installed xp pro and some other programs, including aol and opera. Now, when I'm online, I can surf the web through aol, but ie and opera wont open any web pages. I tried www.google.com in opera and it tells me "could not connect to remote server." The only thing i can think of that may be wong is that i dont have a network controller driver installed, but even if that's the case, why does aol work and the other two dont? Thanks for your help in advance.

Doesn't AOL use some proxy thing? It probably messed up the settings in IE and Opera.

not that i know of

problem solved...thanks. it seems that restarting the computer helped. i thought i'd already done it, but i forgot it only hibernated.