Hello I am trying to troubleshoot a friend of mines computer who for whatever reason hasnt been able to get on the web for a while..He uses a dial up connection to aol. i guess theres 2 problems really..The AOL problem goes like this: The modem dials out it connects to aol goes thru the routines then at like Step 4 i believe it produces an error message which i cant reproduce at the moment because the phone line is in use basically when its trying to talk to the network the error pops up . The second problem is when i tried to connect him to my LAN thru my router it doesnt connect thru DHCP..i have a broadband cable connection that normally links 2 computers in the house. i disconnected the other PC to hook his up to..After tons of troubleshooting using ipconfig...i try to release and renew and the automatic private address is all i get. I tried to set a static 192.168.1.X address with the router IP as the default gateway and then put it back to automatic...still when i try to release the automatic IP it stays and doesnt go to 0.0.0.0 or whatever...how do i get this machine back online?? FYI the connection is fine with the PC i disconnected. do u think its a NIC problem?..its an Onboard Nic. I just need some help. Thanks for your assistance :cheers:

try installing a separate NIC, if it works then it is probably the problem. you can always disable an onboard NIC

Tru but still this dialup problem seems to be part of the problem what i will try to do is remove the spyware on his system first and see what i can do from there..i did notice he has the wintools trojan. So i'll remove everything..have a feeling spyware might be part of the problem. Think it could be the Winsock?

Some malicious programs can definitely alter or break your TCP/IP connectivity. If you already know that the system has infections, you should get rid of those before going ahead with other troubleshooting measures.

Read through the threads in our Security forum for information on detecting and fixing the infections, and if you have any questions that relate specifically to spyware/viruses/etc., please post those questions in a new thread in the Security forum; that's where we deal with those sorts of issues.

Hey thanks for the info i finally got everything working on his oc b4 ur post though and it was exactly what u just said. He had WinTools trojan on his PC...I cleaned that up in safemode and i also had to rebuild windows installer @ cmd prompt..after i rebooted everything was good the NIC got an IP right away...and the modem dialed into AOL...so i installed Giant Antispyware and updated Spybot and Adaware for him...and advised him to keep it all up to date as much as possible.