The other day a friend left me their laptop with the problem of internet access or lack therof. Could not get an internet connection through dialup or broadband.

Here’s the history: They used to use Norton Anti-virus and the subscription ran out – yes I hate that too. When will we get virus patterns for life?
Rather than renew, Norton was uninstalled.

Secondly, AOL was the method of internet access.

So with that knowledge I set to work:
a) I tried dialing up AOL – no joy. It failed with a message that told me to go check my firewall settings.
b) I checked the firewall in Windows Service Pack 2, it was not installed.
c) The machine was running XP home edition by the way.
d) I tried plugging in my ethernet cable. Nothing happened here and an IP release/renew did not work. It gave me a weird message saying “Operation Was Attempted on Something That Is Not a Socket”.
e) Suspecting a virus, I installed Symantec with the latest patterns files and after a full scan and 90 minutes came back to 0 viruses found.
f) In the meantime I’d found this article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. It didn’t work as you cannot uninstall TCP/IP in an XP home machine.
g) Then I found this handy tip. Turns out you can reset the TCP/IP stack with a little netshell command. Good one to know.
h) After many many quick reboots, that didn’t work either. But now I was getting a different message from IPconfig. So I suspected the entire winsock/tcpip/hosts file stack was screwed.
i) I tried re-installing Service Pack 2. That did nada.
j) I found WinSock XP Fix et voila, it reset everything, rebooted and it’s all working now.

The whole thing took over 8 hours to fix.

Clearly this was a case of spyware and adware toolbars gone mad. A word to the wise: don’t install toolbars or anything else you really don’t need and don’t use AOL. It’s just not worth it.