Hi All,

Usually able to deal with PC monsters but this one has me all but beat. It's a Dell Inspiron 1525 for a colleague with 32bit Vista on it, SP1 only (SP2 wouldn't install but after a lot of online searching and trying various fixes, I decided it's the least of my worries).

As the subject says, the machine can't get on to the internet via a cable or wireless signal, just gets that useless 169.254.x.x private IP address. The user says that problem started after uninstalling Norton (not sure what variant), can find out if crucial.
So anyways he brings it to me and whilst trying to clean out any bloatware, noticed Windows telling me the Firewall was off. I try to turn it on, but it just won't do it. I even try to do it in Services.msc, but I just get an error in there as well asking me to check the System Event Log for more info. Needless to say I didn't get more info there.

Has anyone ever encountered something like this? Anyone got any ideas, save doing a re-install of Vista?

Cheers