The other day I came across a pretty serious malfunction of my computer.
I have a windows XP home edition, updated in less than a month ago as a patch level (never install the latest patch until after a few days of the issue: it is one of my religious principles).
After typing the password, I entered the desktop and everything seemed to adjust ..... except the fact that you could not in any way to access the net!
occurred several anomalous behavior:
1) The icon on the tray icon showed the presence of the cable network, but the computer, in fact, does not acquire any IP address (and therefore could not access the internet). Removing the cable, sometimes the icon on the tray icon indicates the gap, sometimes not.
2) Trying to disable the network card (from Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager) window is blocked, and it was necessary to kill the process.
3) Trying to disable the network connection, the same block. And if, after the kill, the network connection was actually disabled, it was impossible to re-enable it: the window was always locked.
4) Ditto if you tried to disable audio, TCP / IP properties of the connection, removing the flag next to "Internet Protocol (TCP / IP)" means all blocked!
5) Any ipconfig (renew, to, release) had resulted in a concise "Windows IP Configuration" and nothing else.
6) All cards, or wireless LAN, showed the same behavior.
7) Re-installing card drivers did not lead to any improvement.
8) When you start Win XP in Safe Mode did not change things.
short, as if he had broken something related to the management connections, and not to a single network card: something seemed to cross, more connected to the protocol or winsock.
In reality, though now I do some 'easy, it took a little' time to find a solution avoiding to reinstall windows ......
Since we are dealing with a connection problem where, given the abnormal behavior, has broken something, your best bet would be to re-install only the Protocol or in any way to reset everything that is related to winsock.
Well, Win XP can do both! Since I am not an expert in administration, so I will not go into too much detail, but at least the steps you take to solve the problem is interesting to know.
To reinstall and reset the so-called TCP / IP stack (software components that define the Internet Protocol), there is a command to be launched from a command prompt: netsh int ip reset
log_file.txt
With this configuration TCP / IP becomes the one in windows after installing the operating system.
It 'also possible to reset the Winsock Catalog (ie, the set of so-called Layered Service Provider: components that are used in applications, can intercept and modify network traffic) to do this simply run the command
netsh winsock reset
In this way the catalog is reset and the configuration becomes that of a freshly installed Windows.
Running both of these operations, the system prompts you to reboot, and the problem is solved ..... avoid a complete reinstallation of the operating system!
A reference in reading advice to those interested is:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/19/reinstall-and-reset-
tcpip-internet-protocol-in-windows- view-2003-and-xp /
