Cannot find server error in IE with dial-up

[Matt Buxton]

Hi

I`m new to the newsgroup, so be gentle with me. I`m a reasonably competent
PC user but this problem has me totally stumped. I recently visited a friend
and removed a ton of spyware and viruses from their PC using Addaware and
NOD32 antivirus. When I rebooted the PC, I was able to dial into their ISP
and connect sucessfully, but whenever I open up internet explorer (or for
that matter MSN messenger) I get the "page cannot be displayed" page, no
matter where I try and surf to. The ISP in question states that "obtain an
IP address automatically" and "Obtain DNS server address automatically"
should be selected, and they are, but still the problem persists. Does
anyone have any idea how I can cure this? Would typing ipconfig /flushdns
into the command prompt be worth a shot? Any help would be really
appreciated as the next step is to completely reinstall the system which I
don't really want to do.

Thanks in advance

Matt

 

[Nepatsfan]

You might want to take a look here:

http://www.spychecker.com/program/winsockxpfix.html

http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm

 

[Matt Buxton]

Sir I am in your debt. I will try these programs tomorrow and post my
results!

 

[Matt Buxton]

Thanks once again, one click and the problem was solved.

I see from browsing MS knowledge base that there is something in SP2 to
address this issue, have a look at article ID: 802350 "After you run
Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware (Beta), you have network-related problems, or
you recieve an error message"

 

[Nepatsfan]

Glad to hear you got it fixed. The problem you encountered often
happens after running spyware removal tools, not just
Microsoft's. You'll see a lot of responses in these newsgroups
that suggest downloading those two fixes before running a spyware
scan. That way you've got them on hand in case the internet
connection gets broken.

By the way, the keyword in that article you mentioned is "Beta".
I try to make a practice of never installing beta software (or
software from sources I'm not familiar with) on my main PC. I've
got another rig setup for just such experiments. When I first ran
that MS program, it returned a number of false positives. I think
I'll wait until they remove the word Beta from the title before I
try it again.