ok. I’ll try the safe mode with networking tonight. If not, tomorrow afternoon isn’t that far away.
It’s pretty sad that I care this much about an internet connection. What did I do fifteen years ago? Oh well, I guess I’m just rolling with the times.
When you had your girlfriend’s laptop hooked up, did you power cycle the modem? If not, it probably wouldn’t recognize the MAC address of her NIC; so no IP given to the laptop.
I did not power cycle the modem. Oh well. We’ll see what happens tonight and tomorrow.
I’m learning lots of interesting things though!
When I had this a few years ago it was Zone Alarm, even though it was disabled. I had to actually uninstall it to stop it getting in the way.
OK, here’s the deal:
The cable guy showed up and I showed him the problem. He tried to ping www.yahoo.com and of course it failed. He then pinged what I think is a DNS server at 10.61.224.1. It did get a response from there. All 4 packets came back fine. At this point he declared that their equipment was working fine. He said it was probably a Winsock problem and that they’ve been seeing a lot of that recently. I asked him what the solution was and he said that he didn’t know. He thought some people were going back to an old restore point but he didn’t know if that helped. He connected his laptop to the modem and it connected just fine (after power cycling the modem).
So I tried to restore to a point when I knew everything was working. It looked like the restore went fine. Still no connectivity.
I then uninstalled Zone Alarm. Still no connection.
I then tried Safe Mode with Networking and no connection.
So, my question now is, do you guys think this is a Winsock problem? If not, any suggestions? If so, any idea of how to fix it? Or should I just take it in to Best Buy or somewhere?
You may actually have to reinstall Windows. Just make sure everything important is backed up.
No no no, don’t go reinstalling yet; this problem is surely fixable.
If it is indeed a Winsock problem, then (assuming you’ve got xp sp2) you can reset the Winsock settings to their default using the command “netsh winsock reset” at the command line. This will remove all modifications made by any third-party programs that have tied themselves in to Winsock; these are what often screw things up, either due to an incomplete uninstallation, or (in the case of some spyware) because they meant to.
If you run this command you will have to reinstall any legitimate software you had that tied in to Winsock, however. Zonealarm will almost certainly need to be reinstalled, this site suggests Google Desktop might be affected (although I have it installed and there’s no sign of a Winsock hook for it on my machine).
What I’m afraid I can’t tell you for sure is whether your machine’s symptoms are in fact the result of a Winsock problem. I’d be a bit surprised you can ping anything if Winsock is the culprit. Assuming that the IP that was pingable was a DNS server, DNS requests should work; what happens if you try the command “nslookup www.yahoo.com” at the command line?
Also, what happens if you ping yahoo.com using its IP address, 87.248.113.14?
Okay, forgive my three posts in a row, but I just remembered where the Winsock testing tool is. If you have a Windows CD, browse to SUPPORT\TOOLS on it and run setup.exe to install a bunch of diagnostic stuff (make sure to choose “complete install”). Then at the command line run “netdiag /test:winsock /v”. This ought to tell you whether Winsock is knackered or not. If you don’t have a CD, you can get them from here (but will need to run Microsoft’s annoying Genuine Advantage check first).
Okay, that’s the last one for now, I promise. 
What in the world makes you think that this is a solution to the problem? Other computers have been brought in and had the same problems.
This is all getting a little difficult running back and forth to the public library.
Ok, what I did after noodling around on the web was run from the command line “netsh int ip reset catalog” followed by “netsh int ip reset rest.log” While I have no earthly idea what that did, it allowed me to ping www.yahoo.com and www.google.com and get a response. However, every web address I tried through Firefox and IE timed out while trying to connect.
I’m almost positive I still have my Windows CD, so I’ll try all the stuff that Dead Badger said to try, in addition to the winsock reset.
The library closes in an hour and a half, so I doubt I’ll be back on today unless through some miracle I can connect at home after trying all this stuff.
Thanks for all the help so far. I’ll let you know what happens next.
Hooray! Huzzah!
Dead Badger is the hero of the day!
“netsh winsock reset” worked like a charm. Ran it, did the reboot it suggested and to all appearances, everything is working just dandy!
Thanks so much to everybody for the help.