This is behavior by design and related to Universal Plug and Play Features in Windows Me.

239.255.255.250 is a multicast address, routers advertise their presence with multicasts which are picked up by devices that need to be aware of other devices on the network.

It resolves to some school, but only because they secured the IPs. Multicast packets don't route like normal packets, none of the traffic is going to that domain.

thx for your answers. I was given a very similar answer from IPC Computing Services:


>Windows Explorer tried to connect to the Internet (239.255.255.250),
>but
>was denied access by the Internet Lock.
>
>User: default
>Program: Windows Explorer
>Time: 03/04/2001 19:32:58
>
>whois -h whois.arin.net !net-mcast-net ...
>University of Southern California (NET-MCAST-NET)
> Information Sciences Institute
> 4676 Admiralty Way
> Marina Del Rey, CA 90292-6695
> US
>
> Netname: MCAST-NET
> Netblock: 224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255
>
> Coordinator:
> Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (IANA-ARIN)
>
>iana@IANA.ORG
> (310) 823-9358
>

Your computer appears to be configured with an IP address from a
range of addresses that are reserved for a special purpose. If you are not
on a network, you don't need an IP. If you are on a network, please
talk to your network administrator about getting a valid IP address.
If you don't know how to reconfigure your computer and you don't have
a network administrator to help you, try going to the place where you
bought the machine.

Below is some information on the reserved address block in question.

IP addresses in the range 224.0.0.0-240.0.0.0 are reserved for use by
IP multicast services on the Internet. Various addresses in this
range are used by routers and others are used by systems that have
multicast IP enabled. If you see these addresses on your network, the
most likely causes are systems or network devices within your own
network that are using IP multicast.

IP multicasting is the networking technology that enables the delivery
of real-time multimedia while saving network bandwidth. Most of the
widely-used traditional Internet applications, such as web browsers
and email, 'unicast' between one sender and one receiver. In many
emerging applications, such as live transmission of multimedia
training and university courses one sender will 'multicast' to a group
of receivers simultaneously. Only the ones who are 'subscribing' to
the multicast data will receive it, thus reducing network traffic and
using available bandwidth economically.

ISI's name may appear in the association with IP multicast addresses
because of the role that ISI has played in the development of internet
protocols and the RFC documents that describe these protocols.
However with the growth of the internet, responsibility for the
management of these addresses has transitioned to the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Should you have
any further questions or concerns, please contact ICANN directly
(310-823-9358 or icann@icann.org).

USC-ISI
IPC Computing Services

I had very similar problems to the one you are experiencing -- after being virtually "locked out" of my system by some strange "administrator," I discovered that whenever i used explorer, despite the fact it was set to a specific home page, zone alarm noted that it was being "sent" to a different connection number.

You would NOT believe the stuff I found in my pc. And since this is the second dell since February (the first one, right out of the box, as you say, did the same thing), I would suspect some sort of security issue afoot....something I've never encountered with any of my previous pcs.