DNS Stopped working (Not Nortons)

[Ken Ottinger]

Greetings,

I have an XP box as part of a home LAN with 4 other XP's and Vista boxes.
This morning the XP in question stopped seeing the Network assets and can't
resolve a website through IE. The NIC lights up on connection and the Local
Connection shows the correct network speed and connect time.

IP is assigned a NIC internal 169.254.xx.xxx and /renew commands receive a
time out response. All other boxes are fine. I've flushed, cleared, rebooted,
reset the Router just in case. I've deleted the Local Connection and NIC
driver to allow reinstall. All to no avail.

We did not allow SP3 to try loading so there's no partial load issue for
that. I tried a restore to last week but that also did not work. This box
doesn't have Nortons (System Suite 7) and I've disabled /re-enabled Firewall
XP and System Suite (no, I don't run two, I was trying one or the other for
effect).

I tried manually setting IP / Subnet and dns addresses, which the machine
seems to accept but won't use. At auto, everything reverts to internal
addresses without acknowledging the network.

A Local Connection repair attempt produces an error that an address could
not be assigned to the computer.

I'm completely stumped. Any ideas? Any input or suggestions is greatly
appreciated.

 

[GTS]

I suspect either a damaged TCP stack or a hardware failure in the NIC. I
have seen NICs fail despite being shown functional in device manger (which I
assume you checked?). It wouldn't hurt to try a different LAN port on the
router also to eliminate the unlikely possibility of a router problem.
You might try running "netsh winsock reset" in a command prompt. If that
fails I would be inclined to try another NIC.

 

[jlm]

Also check the network cables.

I suspect either a damaged TCP stack or a hardware failure in the NIC. I
have seen NICs fail despite being shown functional in device manger (which I
assume you checked?). It wouldn't hurt to try a different LAN port on the
router also to eliminate the unlikely possibility of a router problem.
You might try running "netsh winsock reset" in a command prompt. If that
fails I would be inclined to try another NIC.

 

[Ken Ottinger]

This is a follow-up to my own original post.

Thank you for the suggestions fromt he two that have posted.

1) Resetting, flushing, wiping, renewing, begging and swearing at the
TCP/IP, DNS cache and winsock services yields no positive results.

2) I disabled the onboard NIC and installed a new PCI NIC. Install was
flawless...immediately addressed as an internal address and can't see the
network or internet.

3) I also swapped cables, bypassed a switch and skipped over a router to go
straight to the gateway. No dice.

4) At one point an AOL error popped up (yes, at one time I agreed to let my
wife load AOL....I was young.) Saying an aol connectivity file was damaged. I
reloaded. No change in functions.

5) I've uninstalled and reinstalled XP's network services. No good.

I can usually get through just about anything, particularly with help like I
get from these groups but this one has me fried.

Any ideas?

 

[jlm]

Shutdown all computers on the network, then restart the one giving the
problem. If this doesn't work, try moving the nic to another slot on the
computer.

If the above two doesn't work, try running the WinsockFix program on the
computer.

 

[Ken Ottinger]

jlm, thanks for the suggestions. I'd tried the lone computer boot-up aproach
without success and bounced teh NIC around. I didn't know about the
winsockFix program. I'll tuck that in my pocket for another day.

I ended up running out of time (the need to be productive was getting
oppressive) so I fell back to an XP reload/over load. Not a scrub, just
loaded XP back to its off-the-disk condition. The box immediately saw the
network and the internet.

I only killed a few apps that needed windows updates to run properly and who
imploded when they found they couldn't run. Not the worst recovery but I'd
like to have found a nice surgical fix rather than the big stick method. At
least it wasn't a "start from a freshly formatted drive" condition.