I have been running Windows 2000 pro for several months, and today noticed several command windows popping up along the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I opened them up and to my shock there were several instances of attempts to hack my administrative priveleges. I ran Tauscan's trojan remover, and it didn't find anything. The Siemen's speedstream router I'm behind didn't have ANY IP's logged other than my cable providers DNS server. (firewall enabled) It continued even after I disabled some services in the administrative tools, so frustration got the better part of me and I deleted the WinSock and WinSock2 folders. (hoping to remove any hidden proxies) Sadly I forgot Win2K won't replace WinSock, and all my network connections were killed. I had been waiting for a good reason to upgrade to XP, and I assumed the upgrade would fix this problem. IT DIDN'T! My registry was in the exact same state as I had left it under W2K. I had tried to hand copy the registry settings from my wife's W2K PC and they didn't work, and after the upgrade the same settings were there. What do I have to do to freshen up the registry, specifically the WinSock key, without formatting and re-installing XP? For starters I've deleted Winsock (the bogus one I created) and am in the process of re-loading again. Any advice is appreciated!

The only thing I can think of to do is go into the registry and delete the winsock and the winsock2. Reboot and with the xp cd and repair the installation. That might be why pro didnt pick it up in the upgrade install....just a thought before the dreaded format and clean install...