I bought my son a used Toshiba Tecra S1 - with a 20 gig hard drive - laptop for his birthday - it ran great - then he downloaded things from the internet and then it ran not so great. So I gave him my 300gig Freeagent external hard drive and did a clean install of Windows XP using his license # - I reformatted the 20 gig hard drive when I did this - I went to Toshiba.com and down loaded all the drivers for his laptop and it has everything it should - I even made the wireless work like it was suppose to and everything - I also did the Windows Authorization - I called it in - put in the extremely long code they gave back to me - It said it was fully authorized and a legit copy of Windows XP.

Running: Windows XP SP1 - IE 6 - Firefox 3.5

Now here is the problem: I can not access any Windows.com or Microsoft.com from that laptop at all - I can not do any updates or anything that would require me going on the Microsoft.com website (I can't even update IE) - I can use a standard address: 65.55.12.249 to get to the main Microsoft.com website but that is as far as it will let me go - it will not allow me to actually navigate away from the page using the links it tells me that the server can't be found. There is no virus on this computer. I have looked online for what the problem could be and a fix for it but I'm only finding things related to having a virus. I also cannot turn on Automatic Updates.

Regarding trouble connecting to Windows Update, take a look at this, you'll need to add some entries to the Trusted Site in Internet Options:
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/cant-access-windows-update-after-win-xp-install-t679720.html

To enable Automatic Update, here's the how-to via editing the registry: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328010

Saw this same problem, turned out to be the 'Background intelligent transfer service' was turned off. Once it was set to 'auto' all was well.