Ok here is some background. This machien looks to have had a virus, all cabs relating to network seem to be gone, getting socket errors in netscape and IE, has eAnthology antivirus/util suite. Can ping ip's through command prompt but no dns resolution under comand prompt. but all internet based apps fail to load. all get errors. Winipcfg does not error out, ws2bckup is not there, winsock has been extracted manually and through SFC. any ideas?????????

Look for software called Newdotnet or new domains in add/remove programs and remove it. Also check for the bugbear virus.

That wasn't it. the New.net Domain 4.50 client was in there, so i removed that. still unable to ping names and still getting socket error. ran SFC and restored wsock32.dll and winsock.dll not change. any more ideas? this one has me stumped.

Follow the instuc's in responce 2 here. http://computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/128184.html When you ran SFC did it say that the wsock32.dll was bad or did you just restore it anyway? wsock32.dll in windows 98 SE should be 40K in size if its larger you may have a virus.

There is a way to manually repair the winsock2 registry key, but I can not find the post that i had typed it into and its way to long for me to retype at work. :(

interesting development, i did as you said but when i went into the registry there was 2 keys for current control set. they are as follows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Current Control Set the first had everythign under it and by checking a second machine i see this is proper. but the second had nothing in it. i deleted the secodn one entirely and then backed up and removed the winsock2 key as instructed. i then rebuilt the network and DUNS, and the DUNS connectoid. EUREKA!!!!!! Thanks a bunch!! thsi one was a hair puller.