Ekern.exe Causing Crashes - Help?

My computer has begun crashing in the last 48 hours due to errors with Ekern.exe. One example event is contained below:

Faulting application ekrn.exe, version 3.0.642.0, time stamp 0x47bbf4a5, faulting module mswsock.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a72f, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00016c0a, process id 0x5fc, application start time 0x01ca28afdda01a3b.

The crash usually occurs when surfing in any browser (IE8, FF 3.5.x, Chrome).

Any help in layman's terms would be helpful.

 

I recommend you to create a sysinspector log and then to ESET using ESET Customer Care Support.
How do I create a SysInspector log?
ESET Customer Care Support

 

First of all, install the latest version 4.0.437 to see if it makes a difference. Version 3.0.642 you're using is far too old and may suffer from bugs that were fixed in later v3 or v4 builds.