A co-worker got a virus on his computer. I was able to remove it but, after running ComboFix, it 'broke' his Windows. It seems he was running a hacked copy, and ComboFix deleted a dll file it wanted. Signs of the virus were still present, so I decided to give him a legit OEM XP license that I had as a spare and reformatted to install from scratch. Things were going well until I installed SP3, after which the Internet stopped working. JUST the Internet. So I putted around with it for a bit, couldn't find anything, and wound up reinstalling XP again.
No dice. Right from the get-go it seemed like it was having serious issues keeping it's DNS settings properly. But after puttering around some more and trying almost EVERY trick in the book, the issue was still intermittent. Sometimes it would come on by itself, most times it wouldn't. Flushing and re-registering the DNS cache would sometimes work... WinSock fixes did nothing. All this time the IP numbers are SOLID, and every other machine on my network works great except for this one, so it's not a router issue. I can ping every machine on my internal network, including the gateway, but outside Web addresses are hit and miss, even when using their IP addresses.
Running the 'Repair Connection' doesn't work. The ONLY thing that seems to solve the issue consistently is to disable and reenable the network adapter in software. I don't think the owner of this PC will be tolerant enough to do that. Any ideas?
