DNS problem with gmail (404) - possible dns poisoning

Yesterday I had the weirdest phenomenon, my gmail stopped working.
It just returned a 404 error (page not found).

Why do I say it was weird ?

• Because it happened only on one of the computers in my network, while the other machine had no problems getting to gmail.
  
  
• Because it happened on both IE and FF so it did not seem to result from a browser specific issue.
  
  
• Because it only effected gmail but on the same machine I had no problem accessing any other web site including other google services such as calendar.
  
  
• Because pinging to gmail.com or mail.google.com or googlemail.l.google.com all returned addresses that seemed to be valid google IPs.
  
  
• Because when using IE to try and get to gmail.com I got a windows authentication dialog (and I really don't think gmail is running on windows based machines).
  
  
• Because it turned out that it was actually trying to access the local web server on my machine and when I configured it to return a page when asked for /mail it did return that page.
  
  
• Because at some point a ping to gmail.com started returning 127.0.0.1 (localhost).
  
  
• Because this happened at the same day to a friend that was running Vista. (we do have both linksys routers and use the same internet provider.)
  

Eventually this was fixed by calling ipconfig /flushdns - I guess a restart could also do the trick.

Why and how did this happen - I have no idea.

Has anyone else encountered such strange behavior ?