Hover over "network" icon in task bar and it says "Connnection status: Unknown The dependency service or group failed to start." When I click "Diagnose and repair" "Windows Network Diagnostics" pops up and says, Network Diagnostics cannot run because the Diagnostics Policy Service is not running. Clcik to open Service Control Manager. You will need to manually start the Diagnostics Policy Service. Once this service is started, you can runn Network Diagnostics." So I go into services to start the service, right click the diagnostic policy service and click start and it attempts to start and then says "windows could not start the Diagnostic Service service on Local Computer. Error 5: Access is denied." This is an administrator account. I'm at a loss. I've searched high and low no the web..found alot of similar problems but no definate answer on how to fix. Hoping someone here will have the answer I need. Thanks for taking the time to look into this.

Open explorer. Go to C:\windows\system32\en-us Right click on services, left click on run as administrator.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it and I still get the same error (access denied). I noticed that there's a few services not running, namely DHCP. It gives me the same error when I try to start it.

Disable the firewall, just in case there is something blocking it there. Look at the device manager and the event viewer for more information.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I couldn't even disable the firewall. It told something about the service not running, (sorry, can't remember exactly I'm at work right now). No problems in device manager. I'm trying an upgrade now and I'll see if that solves the problem.