I think you and Chris are right.
if it was a car problem I always try to make the problem re-occur(even though it goes against what that old mechanic said) and then fix it instead of just replacing one thing after another untill it is fixed. I like to know EXACTLY what's going on and what happened.

this happened to me recently, the DSL needed reset as for some reson the dsl it was connecting to would not connect to anywhere else, i called a computer buddy of mine and we set the dsl ip to his company (he has big servers) and it worked like a charm and has never been faster even :)
what we think happened is a virus or something redirected my dsl to a different server which would intercept and show spam pages with any search.

Or maybe Wayne realized we were on to him, his jig was up, and he "released the Internet" back to the masses :)