Well, my problem began yesterday. Nothing was wrong with my system starting yesterday. It seems that during the day while browsing on the internet -- web sites started to die. At first it was just a few forums that seemed to 'go down.' I could access IRC, AIM, and LimeWire (gnutella network), and google still worked for the *most part* (some sites on google search didn't work also when they should have). I was playing with my new DVD/CD-R/RW burner with lightscribe and nero burning rom. After I finished with that I noticed that all websites did not work. Nothing worked at all, google, yahoo, microsoft, {computing.net}, no matter what I tried, they were all down. One would think that my internet had died some how. But this was not the case, my router was connected properly, I was properly connected to my router, and IRC - which I never had disconnected from (slashnet.org) and A.I.M. (which I also didn't disconnect from), still worked perfectly. I started asking if the internet had taken a sudden fall, everyone said no, blah blah. I found that when I restarted -- IRC no longer worked, but A.I.M. did, so it was as if the only host left on the internet was AOL instant messenger! How sad, but let me continue. I looked at my running processes -- and I saw some wierd threads running -- and they were working through services.exe in my system32 folder. All the paths that they were loaded from were just random jibberish and I thought something was up. I disabled access on services.exe and found that when I restarted, my system was totally out of wack. The machine was running very slow, the login screen took 30 minutes to show up, and logging in proved pointless for not one service on my computer was running (obviously since services.exe wasn't loading). Amazing I still got on, but anyway. I extracted a copy of services.exe from my windows CD (services.EX_) and expanded it. Went into windows recovery console (having used a RAID driver because I have a RAID0 Stripe installed), and put that back into system 32. Everything work fine again except -- the internet! The internet was and still is, dead. Everything else works fine, all my services are running etc. The internet is still dead, all websites dead, IRC dead. But *AIM* still connects fine, with no problems. It is very bizzare. I have ran Spybot S&D, AdAware 6 Professional, Hijackthis, etc. Nothing found, computer runs smoothly. There is not one even small piece of adware on my computer, and hasn't since I installed the OS a month ago. I checked all services that would seem to relate to networking, all enabled -- look fine. If anyone out there has any ideas, please share, this problem is bugging the s--- out of me. Thank you. :Note: I can get access to webpages only If I use a proxy server -- which is okay but I'd rather get this fixed. I am under a router and other computers on my network get internet access so its not a WAN IP thing. josh