I ran into this problem this past weekend. It jacked my connection all up. The computer wouldn't recognize my modem or anything. I hadn't done a clean install of XP in about a year and a half, so I went ahead and reinstalled. It's amazing how fast this computer runs now. :)
>>vI ran into this problem this past weekend. It jacked my connection all up. The computer wouldn't recognize my modem or anything.<<
There's one spy program and I'm drawing a blank on it right now, but it's like "value shopping" or somesuch and it actually replaces your winsock.dll with it's own. If you use spybot and clean it, you have no connection any longer. You generally have to re-extract it from the cabs.
I clean systems almost daily(everyone brings in their kid's pcs for me to fix, rather unrelated to my job). There's not a single one I've not been able to return to like-new function.
Yep. You're right. But with some patience you can achieve similar goals with Spy Bot. I'm not knocking it, it has it's benefits. You just have to know what you are doing (and that does not apply to me all the time either BTW).
How youthful are you, if you don't mind me asking?