[sherrin]

Hi, something’s wrong with my computer and any help would be deeply appreciated. The problems I noticed with my computer include, first of all, that Internet Explorer 7 could not access any pages. This occurred maybe a month ago suddenly, and I uninstalled it leaving me with IE6 which does work as does Netscape. However when I reinstall IE7 the problem recurs. Also when I cut and paste from IE6 to MS Word (but not from Netscape) it tends to be very slow or to freeze.

IE7 diagnostics informed me that it “detected a problem with the Winsock provider catalog” and it gives me a link to click on and restart to fix the problem but it doesn’t make any difference. I looked at Microsoft’s page on “how to determine and recover from Winsock2 corruption” but couldn’t run the “guided help” function, which replied that “the server name or address could not be resolved.” However I did try some of the manual suggestions and when I ran Msinfo32 and looked in “Protocol” all 10 components and only those were present, which at least for that test showed that Winsock2 was not corrupt.

However I read somewhere to run “ping” tests, which I did and were largely unsuccessful. I can successfully ping 127.0.0.1 which I understand is a loop to my own computer. However when I try to ping the ip address or the default gateway given when I type in “ipconfig /all”, I get a message “ping: transmit failed, error code 64” and that 4 packets were sent, none received. If I try to ping www.google.com or any web address, I get the message “ping request could not find host www.google.com. Please check the name and try again.” I also ran “diagnose network configuration and run automated networking tests” in "windows help and support” and this likewise indicated multiple failed ping tests specifically in “mail and news” and “network adapters.”

I also turned off Windows Firewall and am not running any other software firewalls (not entirely sure if my router may have one built in or if that could be an issue).

I have very limited computer knowledge and most everything I tried above was by following others’ step-by-step suggestions to similar problems, so please bear this in mind when responding – I’m grateful for any suggestions!

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Hello:

Although this sounds like a system problem, you should try rebooting the modem and router. The prefered method is to shut off the devices starting at the end of the line and working your way back to the wall. So, you should turn off your PC, then turn off your router (if applicable), and then turn off your modem. Leave these devices off for several minutes.

When turning them back on, start at the wall and work your way out. So, you'll turn on the modem and wait for it to make a connection to the interneet (as denoted by an LED light on the modem itself), then turn on the router (if applicable) and wait for a connection light (you should also see an activity light on the modem start flickering because there is activity between the router and the modem, and finally turn on your computer.

When the system comes up, try pinging the router again. If you don't have a router, try pinging the modem again. If you can't ping the router or the modem, you won't be able to get out of your building to the Internet so we'll have to start working from this point.

If you can ping the router or modem, try pinging a web page that you know is active. If this fails, we'll have to start looking at this point.

If you are able to ping a web page, but your browser still isn't functioning properly, we'll know the browser is to blame. If you still have IE7 installed, you can "Reset" the browser to factory defaults by: 1)Open IE7, 2) Click on Tools, 3)Click on the Advanced Tab, and 4) Click the "Reset" button at the bottom of the active window. All settings will be reset to factory default and all add-ins will be disabled. You will not loose your favorites thank goodness.

Try this out and let us know what you come up with.

Thanks,

Magus

[magusbuckley]

Hello:

Although this sounds like a system problem, you should try rebooting the modem and router. The prefered method is to shut off the devices starting at the end of the line and working your way back to the wall. So, you should turn off your PC, then turn off your router (if applicable), and then turn off your modem. Leave these devices off for several minutes.

When turning them back on, start at the wall and work your way out. So, you'll turn on the modem and wait for it to make a connection to the interneet (as denoted by an LED light on the modem itself), then turn on the router (if applicable) and wait for a connection light (you should also see an activity light on the modem start flickering because there is activity between the router and the modem, and finally turn on your computer.

When the system comes up, try pinging the router again. If you don't have a router, try pinging the modem again. If you can't ping the router or the modem, you won't be able to get out of your building to the Internet so we'll have to start working from this point.

If you can ping the router or modem, try pinging a web page that you know is active. If this fails, we'll have to start looking at this point.

If you are able to ping a web page, but your browser still isn't functioning properly, we'll know the browser is to blame. If you still have IE7 installed, you can "Reset" the browser to factory defaults by: 1)Open IE7, 2) Click on Tools, 3)Click on the Advanced Tab, and 4) Click the "Reset" button at the bottom of the active window. All settings will be reset to factory default and all add-ins will be disabled. You will not loose your favorites thank goodness.

Try this out and let us know what you come up with.

Thanks,

Magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

Great to hear from you, thanks! So, I tried your suggestion and powered down the computer then router (I have a single combo router-modem, Westell Versalink), left them off for several minutes and then powered the router back up till the lights were solid and followed with the computer. Before I did this I had connectivity to Netscape and IE6 (which is what I currently have installed); after I did this I had none and so typed in 192.168.1.1 into the browser which indicated that the PPP status was "down" - I told it to turn "up" which it did and then I had connectivity again.

However, both before and after powering down and then up again, the computer still doesn't seem able to ping anything aside from 127.0.0.1. I tried to ping the router at 192.168.1.1 (and also 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.1.255 because I wasn't 100% sure how to ping the router) but none of these were successful. I also tried pinging www.google.com, which I can connect to via browser, and it responded that it can't find the host. Incidentally, when I was running IE7 I did reset to factory defaults with no impact - were I to reinstall IE7 right now I'm pretty certain it wouldn't connect to anything.

I seem to be managing with my computer in this seemingly impaired state but cut-and-paste still doesn't work well from browsers to Word and once recently the computer didn't boot but then did so when I told it to use the last successful settings (though I did have that happen a couple of times prior to recognizing a problem so perhaps it's unrelated). In any case, any other suggestions you or anyone else might be able to give me will be much welcome! Thanks again for your help thus far.

Best,

Sherri

[magusbuckley]

sherrin:

Before I begin, you should know that this is the last post I'll be able to make on this topic for the rest of the day. Don't give up though. I will respond.


Now I need to know the following:

What operating system are you using?

How many NIC (Network Interface Cards) do you have (both wired and wireless)? To find this, open "Network Connections" from within the control panel.

I also need to know how you are connecting to the modem? Wired or Wireless

I'm going to have you change the binding on your NICs. I'll explain what that is and why we're doing it when we get that far.

Thanks,

magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

My operating system is Windows XP and for the past few months I have a wired connection to the modem because my wireless connection seemed to be acting up (though in hindsight maybe those problems are part of what's happening currently).

When I go to "Network Connections" it shows a single icon "Local Area Connection" that says "Intel® Pro/100 VE Network Connection." Hopefully that's the NIC card?

Thank you again for your help and encouragement!

-Sherri

[magusbuckley]

sherrin:

What you saw was indeed the NIC card. The strange part is that you only have one. If you previously were making a wireless connection, then you should have at least two NIC cards. One would be the wired version and other the wireless version. Very strange indeed.

Since your IE6 can connect to the web, we need to find out how it's getting out. Open IE, click on tools, Internet Options, Connections tab, and then LAN Setup (LAN = Local Area Network).

On this screen, I need to know if you see any IP addresses keyed in on this screen or if it is set to "Automatically Detect Settings".

This is a strange situation indeed. If you can't ping your router, then there is no connection to the router. If there is no connection to the router, you shouldn't be able to access any web pages. This is why I'm interested in how IE is getting out.

Although you are only showing one NIC card, I'd like for you to look at your bindings anyway. The binding is the order in which the NIC cards are loaded into windows. By default, the NIC card that is installed last is at the TOP of the binding order. In the same sense, the NIC card that was installed first can be found at the BOTTOM of the binding list. The NIC card at the top of the list is the NIC that your PC tries to use first when accessing the Internet. I'm curious to know how many cards are in this list.

So...to sum it up. This time, I need to know if IE LAN setup shows any IP address or if it's automatically detecting the settings, I need to know how many NICs are in the binding list and which one is at the TOP, and I"m curious to know if this is a laptop or a regular PC.

Thanks,

Magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

This is a desktop computer. It may not be so very strange that there's no wireless NIC showing because I uninstalled the wireless adapter, which is a Linksys USB adapter, and I think when I uninstalled it the other NIC card disappeared with it.

I looked at the LAN setup in IE6 and everything including "automatically detect settings" is unchecked and all boxes blank, no ip addresses or anything.

I wasn't entirely clear how to look up the bindings so perhaps this wasn't the right place to look but under "adapters and bindings" in "advanced settings" there's the LAN connection and then it says "[Remote Access connections]" in brackets like that. The "Bindings for Local Area Connection" shows "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" first, then "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" as a subheading of that, followed by "Client for Microsoft Networks" with "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" again as a subheading, and all have checkmarks.

Hope that helps any! Thank you again.

-Sherri

[magusbuckley]

sherrin:

Since I now know you only have one NIC card (because you physically removed the USB NIC), the bindings are going to be OK.

Now, to find out what's really going on here.

You can find a list of errors in the event viewer. This is where Windows logs information about your system and the software it runs. To get there, open Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and then the Event Viewer.

On the left, you'll see subheadings like "System", "Application", "Security", etc. When you click on a subheading, the logs for that section will appear in the window on the right side of your screen. Anything in RED is BAD. You can scroll up and down to see the whole log for each section. You can double click on a RED log file to see more information. In some cases, you can have Windows search for a resolution.

If you see an error that is duplicated often, that's probably the best place to start. My best guess is that you'll want to look under the "System" and "Application" headings for this particular problem...though checking the others won't hurt. If Windows doesn't offer to search for a remedy, try googling the information.

If you run into something you can't figure out on your own from here, let me know. You could post a copy of one of the logs and/or the information you managed to google.

Hope this helps,

Magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

I took a look at the Event Viewer. Security doesn’t have any errors or warnings and for Internet Explorer the section states “There are no items to show in this view.” System and Application are somewhat more spotty, though honestly even after looking at some of the Windows resolution links and googling some others I’m not so sure how to proceed or which of these might be implicated in the problem I’m having. I’m in the midst of preparing for an out-of-state move so maybe I’ll be able to devote some more time to figuring this out in a few weeks. But I’ll post you a bit of what I saw just in case any of it impresses you as something I should clearly follow up on.

Two common errors appearing typically in tandem and up to a couple of times a day are under System from the Service Control Manager and state:

“The SVKP service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified.

The MCVSRte service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified.”

It looks liks MCVSRte is part of McAffee antivirus which I uninstalled ages ago but perhaps incompletely. SVKP I’m really not sure about and google seems to yield mixed result about whether it might be some kind of trojan. I don’t seem to locate either of them in my system when I run a search though they do appear in the registry and I’m not sure if I can just delete them there.

Some other system errors occurring much less frequently and some just once include:

“Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the Netman service.

The LoadUserProfile call failed with the following error:
Access is denied.

Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the WZCSVC service.”

Source Print:
“The document Microsoft Word - digital cameras.doc owned by Sherri failed to print on printer Canon PIXMA iP1500. Data type: NT EMF 1.008. Size of the spool file in bytes: 1647680. Number of bytes printed: 169004. Total number of pages in the document: 8. Number of pages printed: 1. Client machine: \\D9HHHX61. Win32 error code returned by the print processor: 122 (0x7a). “

Source DCOM:
“The server {03E0E6C2-363B-11D3-B536-00902771A435} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.”

Several Warnings from TCPIP:
“TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.”

Warning:
“The server {03E0E6C2-363B-11D3-B536-00902771A435} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.”

Warning:
“The browser was unable to retrieve a list of servers from the browser master \\MICHAEL on the network \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{303FAAE9-3147-4403-AD30-766028A719E3}. The data is the error code.”

Error -SAVRT
“Unable to initialize the virus scanning engine database files.”

Error - Browser:
“The browser service has failed to retrieve the backup list too many times on transport \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{303FAAE9-3147-4403-AD30-766028A719E3}. The backup browser is stopping.”

Source CDROM:
“The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\CdRom0.”

About 40 of the above errors listed on a single day but didn’t recur.

“Error DHCP: The IP address lease 192.168.1.47 for the Network Card with network address 0013200E4DB1 has been denied by the DHCP server 192.168.1.1 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message).”

Some Application errors include:

“Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 6.0.2900.2180, faulting module browseui.dll, version 6.0.2900.3314, fault address 0x0002a6b2.

Faulting application , version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00000000.”

ACW_DE:
“Application has encountered error.
/common/fetchacw.aspx?file=cf;1033;acwresource The server name or address could not be resolved”

“Faulting application winword.exe, version 10.0.6843.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00000000.”

I notice also a series of 9 consecutive errors on March 20th involving Norton Antivirus that include the following:

“Security Risk Found!Threat: Trojan.Wimad in File: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\APTemp\APQ50C.tmp by: Auto-Protect scan. Action: Clean failed : Quarantine failed : Access denied. Action Description: Quarantine was partially successful.

Security Risk Found!Threat: Trojan.Wimad in File: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\APTemp\APQ50C.tmp by: Auto-Protect scan. Action: Clean failed : Quarantine failed. Action Description: The file was left unchanged.”

I couldn’t find APQ50C.tmp as a file on the computer when I searched for it so maybe it’s effectively quarantined.

I also have a frequent warning under “Application” source “Userenv” which states:

“Windows saved user D9HHHX61\Sherri registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.”

Windows diagnostics states about the above error: “This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.”

Anyhow, I know this is a lot of data and I fully understand if there’s nothing useful you can make of it other than perhaps to redirect me to looking more in-depth about the causes and solutions to the particular issues, but if anything stands out I’d be glad to know. Thanks again for all your help.

Best,
Sherri

[magusbuckley]

sherrin:

Don't worry about all that data. It's more than what I had hoped to receive so I'm sorry I put you through all that work.

In all that data that probably looks like garbage to you, I found one line that was very useful:

Error DHCP: The IP address lease 192.168.1.47 for the Network Card with network address 0013200E4DB1 has been denied by the DHCP server 192.168.1.1 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message).

There are two ways your computer can obtain an IP address: 1) You configure an IP address manually (Static) or 2) A router, modem, or DHCP server hands your PC an IP address (Dynamic).

In a static configuration, your PC has the same IP address at all times because you've set up the IP address on your PC. In the Dynamic configuration, your PC reserves an IP address from the device handing out IP addresses. When the lease is up, your PC requests a new IP from the device handing out IP addresses.

In the error message from your event viewer, the DHCPNACK stands for DHCP Negative ACKnoweledgement.

Although it doesn't say "Denied", this could still be a security issue. Also, since your modem is wireless, you may have nearby neighbors, especially if you live in an apartment complex, using up IP addresses from your modem. Hopefully someone isn't messing with your modem. If you haven't configured any of the default settings, a neighbor can find the modem's default username and password online. Then, by keying in the IP address of the modem into their web browser, they can access the menus used to configure the device.

You'll be glad to know that I feel we're about to wrap this up. Earlier, I had you unplug the modem from the wall for a while. Now, we are going to RESET the router to default settings. Although you unplugged it from the wall, all settings are retained in internal memory. To reset it, you'll be looking for a small hole (almost always on the back of the modem or router). I say small and I mean it. It's literally just big enough to push one end of a paperclip into. And that, incidentally, is exactly what I want you to do. Turn your PC off. Then, find some small pointy object and shove it into that hole. You'll probably feel the resistence of a button inside. Hold the button in for about 15 seconds or so. The modem will be plugged in during this time. After the reset, turn on your PC and see what you've got. I have a pretty good feeling this will fix your issue.

If it works, get the IP address of your modem again as you did before. Key that IP address into your web browser. You should be taken to a login screen asking for user name and password. If you don't know, use another PC to google the default user name and password for that modem's model number. When you get into the menus, don't touch anything you aren't sure about.

You will DEFINATELY want to change the default user name and password for the modem so neighbors and passerbys can't get in. If you don't need your wireless piece active, I would disable it. That's for added security is all and can always be reactivated if you need to.

Let me know how this works and good luck with the new move. Speaking of that, you'll have to reset the router when you get to your new location anyway if you take it with you. Glad you learned this.

Hope this helps,

Magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

That error appeared in March and didn't recur, but perhaps it's still diagnostic of what's going on now. It might be around that time that my computer was inexplicably freezing and I actually did restore the modem to factory defaults. Unfortunately when I did that there were some passwords or settings that I needed to input or change and wasn't entirely clear about and ended up on the phone with Verizon DSL for a few hours trying before I could access the web again. So though I might fare better this time around and might decide to try it earlier, I'm thinking it might be best to wait till my move to restart the modem.

When I called Verizon that time I did also encrypt the wireless connection then but do suspect that a neighbor was at least making use of our connection prior to that because someone else's files were showing up I think in the "shared files" listing of my computer.

By the way, it just occurred to me to take a closer look at my boyfriend's laptop which has not been having any problems. He is successfully running IE7 and when I pinged to google.com and to the modem today his computer also succeeded at that. I don't know if that indicates that it's not a directly modem-related issue?

Anyway I'm excited by the prospect that restarting the modem might fix this, and will certainly do so in the near future but want at least to hold off till I make sure I have time to resolve it if I need help to get it up and running since I don't want to risk losing connectivity right now. When I do, I'll post back and let you know how it goes. Thanks so much for your help!!!

-Sherri

[magusbuckley]

Sherrin:

If your boyfriends laptop can connect to the Internet, it's not the Modem.

Sorry I wasn't able to fix the problem before you got ready to move. At least, when you arrive, you'll know something is wrong with the PC.

Thanks,

Magus

[sherrin]

Hi Magus,

Yes, it's good (though not entirely comforting!) to know that it's my PC that's acting up. Thanks again for the time and attention you put into trying to help me here!

-Sherri

[sherrin]

Hi Magus and anyone else who might have read this,

So I moved and was still having the same problems, signed up for Roadrunner since Verizon wasn't providing service in Maine, and after a short spell of using the computer suddenly couldn't access any pages at all. Spent a couple of nights speaking with techs who might have well have told me my computer was a near-hopeless case before talking to one who pressed me on whether I was running any firewalls - I had shut down ZoneAlarm but I happened to check in Windows Security Center which to my surprise indicated that ZoneAlarm was nonetheless running. The tech told me that newer versions of ZoneAlarm are incompatible with their software - and apparently at least on my computer with IE7 and with pinging and some other good stuff, because as soon as I uninstalled ZoneAlarm everything seems to be running smoothly on my computer. I should have tried that awhile ago, I'd suspected something fishy since when I installed ZoneAlarm about 6 mos ago it didn't want to install easily either. Anyway, thanks again for all your suggestions - go figure that it was something supposed to be protective that created so many headaches.

cheers,
Sherri