SOS - friend in trouble

[DaveU]

Hi there - a M8 is having problems, per his email:

"I have a problem, perhaps you would be good enough to inform the lads & lassies and tell them I hope to be back sometime, but don't know when.
When I booted up this morning I found my email works both ways, but I cannot get on line, neither IE7 or Firefox or MSN.
I had a 2 hour session with Orange they did their best, but in the end they said it has got to be my end, most likely a corrupted file.
So far I have done a System Restore, a CHKDSK and a full AVG scan both AVG & CHKDSK said all was well.
If I try to open my home page I just get a white screen and at the bottom left it says 'website found.. waiting for answer.
I have come to the end of my limited knowledge so will have to get some profession help.
At least I can use and receive email so it could be worse."

Any thoughts? Cheers guys - you usually come up trumps! ;)

[Franklin]

You could try the LSP fix at the link below.

http://cexx.org/lspfix.htm

[Notok]

I would first run CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com) to clear all the browser caches and such. Then go to the Control Panel, Network Connections, double-click the network connection, go to the Support tab and click the Repair button. I would also reboot the modem and router, if applicable, and update the driver for the network adapter. Of course you want to check firewall settings as well.

Next try pinging Google. Do this by clicking Start, Run, and run "cmd" (without quotes). In the command line window that opens, type "ping google.com" (without quotes). The result should be what you see in the screenshot attached to this message.
-If it cannot resolve google.com to a numeric IP address, then there's something with the DNS.
-If it can resolve the address but not get a reply then something is wrong with the connection (assuming the firewall is set to allow ping replies, which some routers have problems with).
-If it can resolve and get a reply then something is wrong with the software (browser and whatever else is not working).

You might also get TCPView from http://www.syisnternals.com/ to see what's connecting to the internet and details on the connections.

This actually reminds me of what happens on XP SP2 when there are too many half-open connections. XP SP2 limits these to ten and tends to choke network connections when exceeded, lettings some other things through but not others, and potentially causing some freezing. If that's what this is, the person would need to find out what's opening all the connections (P2P software can often cause this, as can worms), deal with that software, then reboot the computer to get the connection back in order.

[Durad]

I would recommend you to download HijackThis, scan and post log file at www.malwareremoval.com and wait for somebody to check it for you.