Okay, been at this one for awhile... Working on an older system (WinXP Home SP2). Came in for upgrades and the inability to connect to the internet. A (Vipre AV/ASW) found 20+ pieces of malware and removed them - trojans, toolbars, downloaders, etc. A subsequent deep scan is showing all clean. The system is still unable to connect to the internet.
Now, for what I've done:
- upgraded the CPU and hard drive (cloned over) - just an FYI - don't think this has an impact on the problem as it occurred prior to all this.
- HijackThis - removed a handfull of bad entries (BHOs, "file missing"s, etc.)
- Uninstalled any extraneous toolbars (Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo)
- Booted to Safe Mode w/ Networking
- Found some extraneous lines in the "hosts" file - all referring to 127.0.0.1 - removed the extra lines.
- Found a lot of "junk" files in system32 folder and moved them elsewhere - strange HTML-coded stuff.
- Ran a couple winsockfix and winsockfixxp apps.
- Ran an LSP repair tool (found no problems).
- Disabled/Uninstalled a "WAN Miniport" adapter found in Networking
- Uninstalled and reinstalled the NIC (PCI - cabled, not wireless here)
- Checked out running processes with Process Explorer (nothing looks unusual)
- Checked out startup processes with MSConfig and Startup Control Panel (although with Safe Mode w/ Networking not working, I don't think it's a startup app problem)
- Ran a registry clean tool to remove the tons of junk in the registry.
Finally, a couple notes:
- When the system came in, it was low on drive space. Disk Cleanup was run, and a great number of folders and files were compressed (showin in blue) - including various Windows files/folder/subfolders, various Program Files folders/files/subfolders, various Docs and Settings files/folder/subfolders, et. al. I manually routed through an decompressed these after the clone to a bigger drive (decompressing the whole C-drive was going to take over a day).
- The system connects to my local network - gets an IP address from my router - sees other PCs on the network. (Router is *not* using MAC filtering.)
- *No* apps are able to connect - IE, updaters, pings, tracerts, etc.
- IE7 pages come up "page not found" - a 'dns lookup' message flashes along the status bar for a moment prior.
Running out of ideas, and thought I'd try here. Now the big catch...with all the new hardware, and me uninstalling and reinstalling the NIC, I've managed to trigger the old "Activate Windows" process. It's giving me three days, which, of course, I cannot get online to do (and I *dread* using the phone - have done it before, what a nightmare!).
My two last resorts are a repair install of Windows, then, if that fails, a full reinstall (as a *very last* resort)...
That's where I'm at. Any and *all* assistance will be greatly appreciated...
