I spend a few hours last night trying to fix my PC and thought I’d mention how it got fixed.
Turns out either getting spyware or removing spyware or even removing spyware shield programs can screw up your winsock chain.
Anyway, being as I am, I fixed it by using this app (XP only, no version for Vista that I could find): Winsock XP Fix
There isn’t any official page (option explicit was the author, but his site is no longer up), but a ton of sites provide the download and you should keep this one handy on a floppy or USB key.
What does it fix? If you’ve ever gotten “cannot connect to the internet” and you know your router is working fine (especially for other systems on your network) then you’ve been ‘fixed’ by removing spyware that then will leave your system inoperable for browsing.
There’s some other stuff I came across at the same time, where I couldn’t get my Windows Firewall to start because of a bunch of issues related to the services being modified on the system by whichever program thought it was a good idea.
First there are three important settings for your windows services, which keep the house of cards standing:
The login, enable/disabled settings, and whether the service starts automatically, manually or is disabled.
Microsoft has a listing of the primary services which will get you back to showroom specs pretty quick if some nice piece of software decided that your services were not set up correctly.
Microsoft Default Windows settings
I came across the most excellent site for infomation on windows services and their settings at blackviper. This is a great site.
I was still having problems after going through all this, but finally got everything working by following these final steps.
Also, running a last:
netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
Seems to clinch the deal. Whew!
