I've been hanging in the forums and newsgroup recently. There have been a variety of posts stating, I can't browse Localhost or http://127.0.0.1 There has not been any pattern to resolve it. This post is dedicated to this very common issue. If you have a solution not listed, please provide a comment and we'll add it to the list. Hope this helps you if the problem is happening..
1) Make sure the WWW service is enabled
2) Verify you can ping localhost and resolve to 127.0.0.1
3) Try adding localhost to trusted sites in IE.
4) Do you get this behavior with Firefox and IE both?
5) Open a command prompt, type netstat -an -p tcp and see if 0.0.0.0:80 listed or something with :80 listed.
6) If IIS is not started and you see port 80 listed in #5. It could be another service, such as Skype as another poster mentioned taking up the TCP port 80
7) Verify you don't have a virus software or spyware program blocking access.
8) Anything in the event logs showing an error.
9) Run Filemon or Process Monitor from sysinternals. this can help show which files or folders don't have access.
