Odd networking problem

[Dave A]

Student brought her laptop in today to have it looked at. Was riddled with
spyware and the odd trojan. Got rid of that stuff handily enough (I hope!).

Then turned to a problem she had been having previous to the infections, and
which could well be related. In safe mode, everything works as expected.
Network access is fine and can run network tools such as ipconfig, netsh etc.

In normal mode things are not so rosy. The network devices will connect,
both to wired and wireless networks successfully, however any application
which utilises network access hangs. IE will sit at 'connecting' and
eventually fail to respond. Firefox does similarly, and Safari wont even get
as far as appearing. If I run ipconfig from a cmd prompt (as administrator)
it hangs, simply does not respond. Ipconfig shows in task manager but does
not seem to do anything. Similarly netsh gives the same response.

I've attempted to repair the TCP/IP stack and check the LSP for rogue
entries but it does all appear to be as normal. I'm not normally stumped but
this has got me I'm afraid.

I would appreciate any help or suggestions from you guys!

 

[MasterChief]

Dave - does she have a firewall?

Did she ever have any Norton products on there because they can really hose
things up when it comes to browsing, etc. If she has or had Norton's on her
machine and removed it, try running NONAV on it (just do a search from
Google).

Otherwise, have you tried removing and re-installing the IP Protocol? I'd
probalby re-install all of the networking components from the NIC on up...

 

[Dave A]

She did have Norton 2005, which I removed on her request. I'll definately
give the NONAV a shot, thanks.

I'll have a couple of hours to play with her laptop again tomorrow and a
reinstall of the protocols was on a list of things to do, was confused by
things working fine in safe mode though...

Thanks again.

 

[Jack \(MVP-Networking\).]

Hi
Safe mode does not fully utilizes all the Network capacities.
Try to follow this process, http://www.ezlan.net/clean.html#refreshnet
If it does not help it might be that too many core files got trashed and a
reinstallation of the OS is the solution.
Jack (MS, MVP-Networking).