Servicing grandma's PC, having problems with internet

[castlef]

Hi all. I was wondering... my grandmothers computer has a cable LAN connection. anyways it was supposedly working last night but today it isnt

so i go over there and all the LED's on the modem are fine, i try to open up a web page and it says "finding www.yahoo.com" (however strangely it switches to www.incredifind.com or something shortly after leading me to believe that her pc is probably infested with spyware) .

It doesnt resolve so i open up Winipcfg and release all the information and renew and it works fine. However i still can't telnet, ping, tracert or use any web browser or anything to access the net. I tried resetting the computer and the modem several times but nothing worked.

im not sure what it is , any ideas? Her computer is configured for dhcp and setting automatically and it appears to be working through winipcfg. TCP ip is properly installed in the network connections and in device manager there are no hardware issues. Also i disabled all startup programs so there is nothing running in the background.

[Sphegdave]

If I were you I would remove the spyware first, it possibly may solve your problem. One time my friend's computer did something similar to that and it turned out to be something adaware removed for me.

[castlef]

well it would be easier to remove spyware if her internet was working

I thought it might be that some spyware hijacked her DNS settings to use some other dns server and that the server might be down or something but I tried manually entering some ip addresses and the requests just time out.

[glc]

Download Spybot Search & Destroy and the latest definitions (they are available as a separate download so you don't have to online update) on your computer, burn them to a CD or drop them on a USB key, and go over and install it. While you are at it, you might also want to get the Winsock repair tool in case it needs it.

http://tntmax.com/Download/Software/...XPFix.exe/view

I understand that even though this was written for XP, it works on previous versions of Windows. This is the "Shaw" tool.

[castlef]

Just to update.. thanks for the help.

I ran spybot and she had tons of spyware on her computer. But after doing all that it still didn't work....

apparently the zonealarm firewall she had was somehow corrupted and after removing it her connection worked. I had all startup programs disabled through msconfig so there wasn't even a zone alarm icon in the system tray and there were no background processes that i could see through control + alt + delete but somehow it was stil blocking her connection.

[Miz]

She definitely needs a firewall so if you haven't, or can't, get Zone Alarm to work correctly, try Sygate's free firewall. I started having so many problems with ZA on both mine and my customer's 98 and XP systems I went to Sygate. I've been running it for a year or so on my computers and haven't had a problem with it.

[glc]

If you have XP, the builtin firewall is adequate and has none of the overhead and configuration issues of any 3rd party firewall.