[djgotee]

Oh, and i forgot this very important item.
Have you recently gotten rid of any malware? If so, you might be needing to do a winsock fix. Do you know of this fix? If not, i can get you to the site that has it, its a tiny progam you would run in windows to rebuild the winsock damage, if it got damaged.

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To do an SFC, youd open a command prompt and point it to your CD drive / i386 folder when you have your XP disk in the drive. Then write sfc /scannow.

[djgotee]

To do an SFC, youd open a command prompt and point it to your CD drive / i386 folder when you have your XP disk in the drive. Then write sfc /scannow.

[grice]

I don't know whether the MS anti-spy ware program got rid of anything - I'll check with my father-in-law. I downloaded WinSockFix along with the other utilities on the malware web site you mentioned earlier and will use it when I can go see him - I'm trying to work it out to drive up this weekend. Does WinSockFix do anything more than the netshell command I used already?

Here's the command I used:

netsh int ip reset logfile.txt

I also, based on an earlier web site I looked at, took a look at the Host file in the WINDOWS/System32/Drivers/etc directory to see if it looked okay. I could view the file - it looked okay, but my thinking it looks okay might not mean a lot.

[djgotee]

Heres the link to the winsockfix on geeks to go:

http://www.geekstogo...ction=show&id=7

netsh int ip reset logfile.txt resets the tcp /ip.

Does the hosts file look default? In other words, no sites listed? Even if there were sites listed in your hosts files that were set to do a loopback, it would only effect those sites to not be viewable.

You really have to pinpoint where you think your problem is, if its in the broswer or broswer related, or with the winsock files, windows files, files relative to int exp, malware or windows system files.

Just some reflection on this whole analysis:
Ive found through experience that most of the problems relative to what you are experiencing are problems with malware or winsock files.

[grice]

Okay, here's what I plan to do -

I'll drive up tomorrow, taking all the utilities on the malware link with me.

I'll check for device problems/conflicts, run WinSockFix, and do an SFC.

If that doesn't fix the problem, I'll do a full malware check following the steps at the site you linked me to.

If I find something, I'll clean things up and go thru the above steps again.

Hopefully, somewhere along here I'll fix the problem. Either way, I'll give feedback here on how things went.

Anything else I should do or look out for?

[djgotee]

Suggestion: if you do a winsockfix, do it after your scan and removal of malware. Good night, steve

ASnd if you think you have system file or int exp file problems, you can do a restore point, but only if you think his restore points are clean. And...you can also try a XP reinstall from inside windows. This only works if you have a XP CD. Ask me how to do this if you want to try it, if all else fails. My email : [email protected]

Edited by djgotee, 03 June 2005 - 08:45 PM.

[grice]

Just returned from in-laws. We worked with Dell most of the day. We went through the anti-malware procedures at the link you listed, used WinsockFix and SFC, restored the computer to a time well before the problem, and checked for device conflicts.

Nothing worked, nothing changed.

We uninstalled some programs and SP2. We did a XP repair.

No change.

In consultation with Dell, we decided that our only other option was to reinstall XP. We did that, and only then realized my in-laws had either never recieved or had misplaced the drivers CD that came with the Dell. As a result, we couldn't reload any drivers, to include the ethernet card.

We ordered a replacement CD from Dell. Hopefully, once we completely bring his PC back up, all will be well. Whatever the problem was seems destined to remain a mystery. I sincerely appreciate your help.

[spade=I3=]

Not sure if you have repaired your problem yet but, I had a similar problem that I worked on for 2 days. I download files off the internet like crazy and suddenly I couldn't get past my google homepage. I tried both IE 7 and Firefox. I could look at all the pages in google like images, video, mail... but could not search or login to anything. AVG virus scan picks up nothing, Uniblue scans pick up nothing. So... I went to start/run/type msconfig. I looked in my startup items which I normally keep completely clear because of gaming and I found a file that was odd. The file on startup was mclwddjh.dll. This is an odd file name because it should not exist and especially in a startup location. I did a web search for this file and found nothing. Not even in the uniblue .dll file extensions search. So... I knew it shouldn't exist. I couldn't delete the file because it was in use and every time I tried disabling it on startup, it would turn back on. So... I went into C:windows/system32/ and found the mclwddjh.dll and renamed it with some numbers before and after like 0000mclwddjh1234.dll just to confuse the program. Restarted my computer and got a error that mclwddjh.dll could not be found. YAY! I was then able to remove the file from startup under msconfig and delete the file completely. The internet works perfectly now and no other issues are to be found.

So, if you see any odd named files in msconfig startup and they wont disable because all should... then follow my steps of searching for the extension to see if its good or bad... or exists at all. Then rename, restart, and delete that poop. Hope this helps you.