Why do I get "General Failure" when pinging host name on a Win 7 node on the network?

In my situation, I found peerblock caused this.

Some applications block http traffic, peerblock for example. These cause pings to fail via the "General Failure" error message.

The way I found the application causing this was to kill processes one by one and checking the pings. Eventually I killed peerblock in my case and my ping started working.

If your pings are failing only for a few sites it most likely Firewall, Antivirus or some other HTTP interception/blocking application like Peerblock, Charles, Wireshark... etc.

I had a similar issue. I had to uninstall the AnyConnect mobility client.

I had a constant ping running and was getting the "general failure." to 8.8.8.8; as soon as the uninstall was halfway done I was back to being able to ping.

Found out through reading a couple of other posts that IPv6 is not exactly disabled by unchecking the protocal in the network adapter settings. Also, there's prefix policies built into windows that favors IPv6 over IPv4.

Turns out Microsoft has some tools that help with choosing presedence or choosing to disable IPv6 altogether on their site. Still not sure why I got the General Failure message in the first place, but at least I was able to fix the precedence using the Microsoft Fix it 50410 on that page (Prefer IPv4 over IPv6 in prefix policies).