I don't know where to begin. Dell Linksys PCI wireless router to Host machine. IE6SP1 Cable internet. This is not my machine. The story. My friend decided to install the McAfee Firewall from his 90 day McAfee trial disc. When done it required he input a password. He did and then had to restart the PC. After restarting it asked for the password that now does not work and can not gain access to the internet due to the firewall blocking him. So, he uninstalled McAfee without shutting it down first. Now, it won't let him access the internet because the program is no longer there. I was able to remove McAfee from msconfig and now the machine starts up normally. He can ping with success but the system tray icon notes that the cable is not connected but the wireless has a strong signal. I realize that it is far fetched to think that someone will know an answer to fix this but hopefully someone with networking experience (unlike me and I know Win98 to boot) will know where or what to check that may lead to a fix in regards to the router or the communication between the two PCs. Thanks for reading, Bryan

sounds like the wireless software is working fine, obviously since the connect status of that is good but that is a piece of software that talks to a pci card nothing more, the software itself is not the network connection and windows does not see it as such so the other little icon, the cable icon, is the driver interfaced with the card that windows is actually seeing as a network device in other works, the firewall probably has changed a part of windows that communicates with the network driver and allows it to work (like the winsock files), since the communication is cut short windows probably defaults to assuming that the network device's cable is unplugged (just another way to say it is not working) i used to work dial up support and our customers had surfwatch, an internet monitoring software program, it was interfaced with the winsocks in the same way as a that firewall probably is, if you uninstalled surfwatch without the password, all hell would break loose and your computer would be hosed (ie. "it broke") so next step i think would be to try to system restore install the firewall software again and uninstall it w/ the password (if it gives you problems about the program expiring, then set the clock back a year) delete and reinstall the winsock files and all network components of the computer (tcp ip etc) reinstall the wireless pci card driver do those in that order seeing if it will work after each one if not, reinstall windows it broke

ndistress, Thank you for your reply. I am not with that XP machine and will have to check it out later. In the mean time I did not notice anywhere that I could remove the Winsock. Can you point me to it for WinXP Home version? I successfully pinged www.computing.net. I did not try computing.net (it's friendly name) I was reading a MS Webcast dialog and am going to try to repair the TCP/IP protocol settings by inputting: "netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt" into a CMD prompt. Otherwise knowing where to find the Winsock stuff would be good. Thanks again, Bryan

i am not sure sorry try reinstalling the service pack

Thank you just the same. In another MS article I found that I can check the status of Winsock from within msinfo32.exe. I am finding this exercise to be a good learning experience. Thanks and regards, Bryan

ndistress, I wanted to follow up withyou in thanks for your input. The restore points were deemed as invalid and unusable by XP due to the fact that the driver for the Linksys PCI card was not signed. I wound up doing a format and fresh install. I determined some spyware or trojan had mucked with a registry setting that I could not locate to fix. All is working good now. Thanks again, Bryan