I just was asked to trouble shoot a strange problem on a friends computer that has me baffled. She had her dial up connections working fine - I was at her home on the saturday and it was working okay. A few days later, she was not able to connect to the internet because her dial up settings disappear from Network Connections. I tried to recreate it and when the wizard said it was finished successfully creating the connection - there was still nothing visible in network connections. I tried it a few times and still nothing. I got an error message saying it was not able to display network adapter information because the network connections service was not running. I went to services and saw that it was running but when I tried to click on Dependencies I got an error message Win32: access denied. I also got access denied when I tried to run the dell help centre software to get the system configuration information. In services, the WebClient service said it was stopping...I rebooted and it still said it was stopping. Then task scheduler stopped and I did not ask it to. The only way to fix it was to use the System Restore which took it back a week to the Friday. The only thing I did on the saturday was email her address book from her old computer to her new computer. Her antivirus software did not alert us to any virus contained her address.wab file. Has anyone else experienced this problem or know what might have happened. I have read about others having similar situations with W2K Pro as well and they did not know what had caused it. I have not heard of a virus that knocks out your network connections - it would not be a smart thing for a virus to do as it would have no way of spreading itself it the network connections stopped working.

sounds like a virus find a working computer go to http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ if you follow instructions properly it builds a version of xp that runs off cdrom instead of hard drive..... include the antivirus and adware plugins this way you can boot a system with a differnt operating system and test or scan it.... or remove hard drive and place in a clean systems box and use the clean system to scan it use online scans to confirm your clean system is truly clean..