Heres the situation.

Sony Viao laptop, Vista home premium.

The laptop functions in all other issues normally but on net access it fails. Network access is fine, and going to network and sharing the network connection is fine yet connection to the internet fails. Here is where things start to narrow down. I am connected to the internet. if I ping an IP it does so fine. This makes sence as the only errors that the laptop has is a DNS service. I've got the actual executable that fails at home (which I'm not currently at) but it is definitely a failure of DNS. Limewire works (as I've never used Limewire I'm not sure on this but I do believe that it does not use DNS functions) However as this is only the second Vista system I've used (this one isn't mine it's a friend's son's college laptop) so I'm not too sure how best to deal with it. All the pages I can find are step by step on setting up a broadband with name and password. The connections used here don't need user and password and the problem really isn't there it's how best to repair the dns service failure of Windows.

Advice?

This could be a DNS cache issue; get a command prompt and try:
ipconfig /flushdns
Also try:
ipconfig /all
to see your DNS server IP address.

One of the first things I did was IPConfig and had no joy on that route. Renewing did nothing either. The only thing I've found is that several others have had similar issues as well.

Check the DNS Client service to see if it’s started and set to “Automatic.”

It is.

Let's try another approach; right-click on your Local Area Connection, under the General tab highlight Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click on Properties, and under the General tab check which radio button is selected:
1-Obtain DNS server address automatically.
2-Use the following DNS server addresses.
If it's the first one then try the second one and see if it works, but you have to have the addresses of the preferred DNS server and the alternate DNS server, and if you don't have them, then you can contact your ISP to get them.