I have a friend that has a computer that had a lot of viruses so I told her I would remove the viruses from it for her. I loaded Spybot, Ad-Aware, aware away, ccleaner, CWshredder, AVG and Ewido then I did all the updates for all this software. I rebooted the computer into safe mode and ran each program.

After I was finished I turned off the System Resore and rebooted the computer normally. After the computer rebooted it was running much faster and everything seemed to be fine with it. Then I tried to go online and it will not. When I click on the IE icon it go to the white page that says this page can't be found as though it had no connection. I tried installing Firefox and it acted as though it also didn't have a connection.

The Internet connection is a high speed cable conection that I used to download all the virus and spyware removal tools from. I am sure the Internet conection is good.

Can someone direct me in what I should try first to fix this problem.

Thanks for the help.

After you turned system restore off and restarted the computer, did you use all your programs to scan and clean while in the safe mode? Have you checked the Network Connections in te contral Panel? What firewall is being used, xp's, software or/and hardware?

you might try http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm
Lspfix.
google search for lsp fix it repairs the winsock files that some malware replaces with its own.

Thanks for your reply.

I tried LSP Fix and it didn't help. I also went into Device Manager and looked at the network adapter and it had the yellow ! by it. When I opend it up it gave me the message that said "Device cannot start. (Error 10)" I tried deleting it and reinstalling it, but I still get the same error. The only firewall I have is the Windows XP firewall, and I tried turning it off and that didn't help. When I ran the scans I did run all of them in safe mode. Does anyone have any ideas what I can do to fix this?

How are you reinstalling the drivers.if its through windows all the files may not be present or indeed they may be corrupt.
You need to try to install the drivers via the disc that came with the card or find the latest drivers online.

This just happened to me and after many frustrating hours finally found out what the problem was.I don't know how it happened but several changes were made to my bios settings including disabling my lan settings.I didn't do it but once i enabled it i was back on the web.Hope this helps.

Just went through this and this is what the problem was.I didn't do it but somehow changes were made to my bios settings including disabling the lan settings.Once it was enabled the internet was accessible again.
Strange!.

I doubt that the problem is the network adapter but to get the drivers reinstalled try a roll back.Go to My Computer and click "View System Information" and select the Hardware Tab then click on "Device manager" and select "Network Adapters" and double click on your Network card. then select the Driver Tab and then Roll Back Driver.

Most likely the winsocks as mentioned above.Try removing them and reinstalling by downloading the following to a cd or floppy and running on the problem computer. First to remove the winsocks http://forums.techguy.org/t368419&highlight=connect.htm then reinstall with this http://www.onecomputerguy.com/reg/xp_winsock.reg

I had another NIC laying around so I put it in the computer and now it works fine. I'm still not sure why the other doesn't work but I guess I will leave this one in it and leave it like that.

Does anyone know of any reason this would be a bad idea?

If the machine was really "eaten up" with trojans, viruses, etc...as many can be from months of being wide open while on a high speed connection....IMO a few of those bugs simply "burrowed down" too deep into the OS...the networking stacks...etc.

Many of the times when a machine gets to this point (so deeply infected - like its "DNA" has mutated) the only way to set things right again is to just reformat.

> PLEASE CONTRIBUTE to Computing.net - Report back what did/didn't work for others' reference.<

Typically the driver .INF files in the Windows\INF folder have been corrupted so if you simply "reinstall" these you're just reinstalling the corrupted files. What you should do is go to the manufacturer's website and d/l the latest driver files for that NIC and install those. These are usually provided with an installer program and overwrite the corrupted files on your PC.