I'm fixing a laptop for a friend so I do not know all of the history with this machine. Also, I have searched through the internet (on another machine) and through this site, but have not found a solution that has worked with this pc. Here's the problem:
This Vista machine connects to the local network and the internet fine. I see the globe over the network icons in the tray and I can ping yahoo, my gateway, other cpu's on my network as well as other sites. When trying to access any webpage in IE7 or Mozilla or even AOL I receive the "The Address is not Valid" page on IE7 (AOL doesn't let me connect and Firefox gives me the can't establish a connection error). It then lists possible reasons/solutions. These do not work. I have seen that this was most likely caused by a windows update (seems this problem hit the net around April 2008 from my research) or it may have been from a uninstall of a AV. I did notice that this PC had McAfee, Norton (not sure if it was NIS) and AVG installed at various times. I have removed all of these and ran the Removal Tools for both McAfee and Norton (Symantec). Neither fixed the issue. I thought there may have been a firewall floating around that wasn't uninstalled correctly, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Another issue that happens is the redirecting of the address bar from what I type in to
http:/// (with 3 slashes).
Now the kicker, I restarted the laptop in Safe Mode with Networking and all works fine (except for the fact that it is in Safe Mode). This leads me to believe there is either a bad driver that loads or a service that is conflicting/blocking the internet when the laptop is in Normal mode. I have run countless spyware removal tools incl Spybot, Ad-aware and Windows Defender. I did re-install AVG and ran a scan and found no problems as well as Symantec Corp for Vista (After I uninstalled AVG) also finding no problems. I have run Hijack this logs for both Normal mode and Safe Mode with Networking and noticed very little differences other than the normal windows processes. I will try to attach them to this post. I also have the bootlogs for both scenarios if these are needed.
I saw the solution of using System Restore to a point before the error occurred, but I do not have a restore point available that satisfies this criteria. Other checks/changes that I have run/done (I know I'll miss a couple since I have been working on this for a couple of days now) include reinstalling the network adapters, disabling IPv6, running all of the winsock (netsh) resets/flushes/renews, manually entering DNS info instead of automatically letting it configure, trying both wired and wireless connections, I ran CCleaner and cleaned out mostly everything, I used the reset option in IE7, I also uninstalled the windows updates since the beginning of the year, I also upgraded to SP1 hoping this would reset IE7 back to factory or correct the bad service/program.
Also, in my searches I saw that there was a problem with a D-Link product and AIRCFG (sp?) and windows update, this error showed up when I originally was given the PC, but I disabled the services (ANIWZCS2 and ANIO) and tried to remove them (to no avail-the uninstall procedure would start, but the programs never left the remove program screen) The laptop doesn't have any D-Link products that I can see, it uses a Broadcom 802.11g Wireless utility and the Intel PRO/100 wired.
I want to fix this without reinstalling Vista if possible. All help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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