Serious problems, neet help ASAP!

[John]

My family's XP workstation running Windows XP workstation with a 75GB hard
drive, and 512MB of RAM running at 1.91 ghz is down. Well the computer boots
but it cannot access the Internet. We live in a rural area and are using
dialup. We usually can connect at about 50K or around there.

Everytime we connect we try and load a webpage we get the "Page cannot be
displayed message." It does this on every website we try to access. I already
called our ISP and they say our settings are fine. What I did to resolve this
problem was the following.

1) Ran Norton Anti Virus and it found 8 viruses which it removed
2) Ran Norton System Works Win Doctor and it fixed many problems
3) Ran Webroot SpySweeper and it found over 3,000 traces of spyware. They
were all cleaned.
4) To the failure of all the problems above I tried a System Restore to a date
when the Internet was working which was 2 days ago, but the restore failed and
said that nothintg has been changed since that date. I then tried a restore to
a week ago and receieved the same message. Personally I think that the built
in restore system is a joke compared to some third party tools.

Just a note just know as I was composing this message on my Windows CE device.
On the desktop the Norton System works icon in the menu below just vanished I
opened the application and the enable auto protect tab is disabled under the
NAV options. So I enabled it and clicked back and it was disabled aagin. Do
you think this could be part of the problem? Perhaps there is a virus that can
only be removed from a boot disk? On this machine we have not created boot
disks. However on my Windows 98 laptop I have createsd floppy disk boot sets
for fixing virus problems that get below the os. Perhaps this should also be
done on this XP station. I am looking and I do not see the option for creating
boot disks with Norton System Works 2004.

Thanks...


John

 

[Ted Zieglar]

"Personally I think that the built in restore system is a joke..."

Actually, System Restore is a very valuable tool. The "joke" is your utter
disregard of safe and sensible computing practices. Now your computer was is
so severly compromised that none of the king's horses and none of the king's
men can put it back together again. You can try re-installing Windows, but
more than likely you'll have to erase your hard disk and start from scratch.

"Protect Your PC"
www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[Guest]

Your problem is a case of jumping in without looking. What viruses were
removed? chack norton's site for removal tools and repair dirrections which
may be needed to not distroy your system if a file can't be fixed.
What adware were you running? did this damage your system? adware is the
poorest quality controled software available that you need to agree tro
install (viruses can be worse but thats about it).
Are you able to dial and can't login?
are you logged in but unable to browse?
we need details of the problem to give a solution

 

[John]

I can dial in and login from that PC but I cannot browse, access aol, or do
anything. However the computer works flawlessly outside the net.

This is not my PC but my family's and they are not computer people. I am typing
this mesage on my Jornada 720 which lacks a floppy disk drive so any repair
tools cannot be exported from here to there. My Jornada syncs with my laptop,
which is hundreds of miles away from me at my home.

I've used Norton all my computing days on my own laptop since Win95 and rarely
have I had any problems with it. In its life since 1998 its cleaned hundreds of
viruses and solved many problems. I cant fault Norton at least in the Windows
9.x oses. I cannot comment on XP. Maybe it is crapware with this os.

My folks do not have the Windows XP install disk, and bye the way the restore
never did its job, so the viruses are cleaned off the system.

Yes if it were my own PC I would carefully take my time in solving this issue,
but since my family cannot wait very long I'm trying tio solve this soon. They
are not very patient and I've told them many times that computers take a long
time to fix, but they do not listen. I've fixed my laptops many times, but
whenever I fix them, I always fully diagnose and troubleshoot. With this
situation I was just rushed to solve it in no time.

John

----------

 

[gerryf]

Geez guys, lighten up. There was probably a time or two everyone did
something too quickly and botched it up worse.

John, hopefully, they had sp2

You may have a corrupted winsock, which is quite common when you remove some
particularly nasty spyware programs.

sp2 has a built in repair option that was missing in previous versions.

netsh winsock reset catalog

Cross your fingers.

Otherwise, you may need a program like lspfix or winsockxp fix

 

[~ FreeSpirit ~]

Geez guys, lighten up. There was probably a time or two everyone did
something too quickly and botched it up worse.

John, hopefully, they had sp2

You may have a corrupted winsock, which is quite common when you remove
some
particularly nasty spyware programs.

sp2 has a built in repair option that was missing in previous versions.

=========================
What is the built in repair option and where can I learn more about it?

Thanks

FS~