[bnaturalcsharp]

Hey there,

I'm trying to fix my roommates computer which is running XP, and have no idea what to do at this point. It all started when she was getting errors with a Norton Antivirus driver not loading. Norton Internet Security went wacky too. She was having trouble connecting to sites such as Hotmail.com and her school's webmail page.

I messed around with things a bit, trying the obvious and noticed she needed automatic updates. Well, it turned out she had not ever done any of the updates including the service pack 2. So I installed the 20 odd back dated updates while I was trying to research her other problem. Well, the new updates unfortunately knocked out the internet connection somehow. She has a wireless connection to my computer (with a linksys wireless adapter), which read "excellent strength" and was connected just fine. For whatever reason that I could not seem to find, she couldn't access the internet through IE, AIM, or anything like that. When trying to repair the connection, it said it failed because it could not renew the IP.

I went into safe mode with networking to see if it was maybe a program conflict or something. Low and behold I got internet just fine in safe mode and was able to run that Norton Automated Support Assistant, which had me reinstall LiveUpdate. Apparently that solved the Norton probelms all together because it hasn't given any errors since.

So I still had that internet problem out of safe mode to tackle... with my searching on google I noticed that a lot of people had problems with the SP2 and their wireless connection. SP2 hadn't been installed yet at this point so it wasn't the problem. I figured I might as well install SP2, and of course, that knocked out the internet connection all together in both normal and safe modes. I got the patch that was supposed to solve the limited to no connectivity problem, and added the registry key, but it didn't fix anything. Instead of having limited to no connectivity, I just had a big X. I also tried a XP TCP/IP Repair thing.

The only other thing I noticed is that for a few restarts I was getting runtime errors for the Linksys Wireless Monitor program. Last time I checked it wouldn't run at all or give any errors. Oh, and I made sure to turn internet security and windows firewalls off.

So that brings me to now: I'm not very famliar with wireless connections so I don't really know what to do from here. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mandy

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Did System Restore (we'll call it SR) create a restore point prior to you doing all of this? If so, just restore the computer using SR. Note that you may lose Norton again.

If you're succesful with SR, repair Norton and make sure it's ok, then create a new restore point in SR.

Then install SP2 again. Don't install all of those updates because probably most of those updates are included in SP2.

Hope you can get this far.

[makai]

Did System Restore (we'll call it SR) create a restore point prior to you doing all of this? If so, just restore the computer using SR. Note that you may lose Norton again.

If you're succesful with SR, repair Norton and make sure it's ok, then create a new restore point in SR.

Then install SP2 again. Don't install all of those updates because probably most of those updates are included in SP2.

Hope you can get this far.

[bnaturalcsharp]

Sorry it took a while to get back here and post, but I wanted to thank you for your help. I was able to do a system restore, fix norton, and then do all the updates. Microsoft Update made me get all of the updates before it offered SP2 to me, but it all worked out fine. I think the key was fixing Norton before doing all that. Thanks!