I'm helping my brothers father-in-law. I've set them up with anti-spyware, and anti-virus in the past because they are just prone to getting all of that. The have a teenage grandson that uses the computer frequently, despite my repeated suggestion to them that he shouldn't be (or should at least have his own PC to wreck.)
Anyhow...I get a call yesterday. His DSL is down. He can't connect the internet at all "page not found" etc...
I burned a CD with Adaware, Spybot, and Firefox. The anti-spyware caught about 114(!) different things, including that "new.net" garbage. But still his DSL won't connect.
The connection is there, the modem connects, the NIC seems OK, but neither browser can get out.
To make matters worse...His Norton Internet Security is showing intrusion detection to be off. The PC is set to start up with the grandson's security settings (i.e. neutered), but he misplaced the password for the Supervisor account so I can't make any changes.
The DSL tech sent me an email with a link to download some different DSL software that should allow us to get online, provided it's not some kind of virus.
If this rings any bells for anyone, I'd appreciate some ammo going in.
If the new software doesn't work, I'm looking at the Norton next. If the password can't be found, I'm looking at having to uninstall, and re-set everything...probably manually as the grandson's security settings don't have privs to uninstall.
Oh...and this is all on a PC running Windows 98...preinstalled. So probably the best that we have is a recovery disk.
If I can't patch things up, my other recommendation to him was going to be a new PC. If we wipe the disk he's going to likely need a new OS anyhow...and for a few hundred more he could get a newer faster box, to go with the nice sound system and monitor that he already has.
I don't recall seeing it but I'll look. It seems to have every other P2P installed.
I'm very likely going to uninstall the DSL software and try re-installing that too. The DSL company sent him a different modem and we tried that with the same result, so it doesn't appear to be the modem.
I think my sister and brother-in-law had a similar problem last week with their cable modem connection. Basically everything was working and running properly, and supposedly the connection was running, but no pages would load or anything. Have you tried running a ping request from the command prompt?
With my sister's connection, the modem was sending out packets of information but not receiving anything. A guy from the cable company came by to check it out and said the winsock drivers just had to be updated. so if your problem is anything like that, I would look into the winsock drivers.
if not, then, sorry I couldn't help much, but good luck anyway.
I totally feel for you though. even after installing firefox, adaware, hijackthis, and stinger, whenever I or my other brother-in-law drops by to check out their computer and "clean it" about once a month, we still find hundreds of things in an adaware search.
Thanks for the help. For what it's worth, the winsock was fine, and imesh was not present on the system...that I could find.
It's awfully hard to update the spyware and virus detection without internet access. He's going to take it to the store where he bought it, they've got a pretty decent service center.
I was able to persuade him to consider either a OS upgrade/hard drive wipe or a new PC if the costs get too high. It's 5 year old 500Mhz PC so it's not worth throwing too much money at.
I have a feeling that either the network/DNS settings got screwed up so bad I couldn't fix them, or the Norton software somehow decided that internet access was bad. And without the Supervisor level privs we couldn't change that.
On the plus side...I'm out! It's in the hands of paid professionals now...until he gets it back.
Usually, when my DSL goes down, everything says it's working, but I just unplug the modem & router, and let them reset for 10 seconds, replug, and reboot. DSL is back up and running in a hurry. Doesn't happen much anymore, but it did the first couple of months I had the service.