[e to the x]

Hi all. I must concede and post on here for help with this problem. My brothers computer is on the fritz and with my limited Vista experience I have little to offer him help wise. Here's the problem:

Last Wednesday he turned on his HP laptop to find that he had no connection to the internet via his wired connection in his room. He checked the connection on the laptop which told him he was connected to the network AND the internet and tried both the wireless and another wired connection. Neither of those worked. My parents PC and my mothers laptop were both connected and working fine so it's not the home router or FIOS and we tried it at my place last night and got the same results. I was able to ping google and some other sites, but his RSS fee would not update, his weather gadget would not load any info and firefox, IE and IEx64 would open and just stay blank, not giving any indication of not having a working connection until trying to access a different site than the home page, at which point the browsers would display the "could not find the webadress" dialogue.

I did a system restore to the day before the issue started and took note of a windows update installed right before the regular checkpoint and his shutdown for the overnight hours prior to the issue surfacing. I ran through the list of running processes prior to the restore and found nothing suspicious and ran through it again after to find things unchanged.

I tried opening the browsers again and again got a blank page with nothing in the address bar and when I tried to go to google I got a "page cannot be displayed" page and then for all the browsers I would get a dialogue box that states "[browser] must shut down do to an error. if a solution is found windows will notify you"

I restarted in safe mode and ran a NOD32 scan. I could not update the virus definitions since there was still no connection to the internet and the scan turned up nothing. The same problems that occured in normal mode also occurred in safe mode with firefox, ie and iex64.

I'm thinking a virus or spyware but find it hard to believe the problem could range across 3 browsers and cause them all the crash the same way.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Help?

Computer was bought in December, is used for email, IM, DVDs and web browsing. From the looks of things nothing seemed amiss.

TIA

-Steve

[Grav!ty]

There's not much I can think of at the moment Steve. I'll boot to Vista X64 in a while and check around. Maybe try disabling IPv6 in the properties of your network adapter.

[e to the x]

thanks.

anyone else...any ideas?

[e to the x]

now other services are crashing as well. there are also 15 svchost services running now using close to 500 MB RAM, 2 nod*32

not looking...good.

[Grav!ty]

Are SP1 and SP2 installed?

[e to the x]

SP1 only

[Grav!ty]

I must say though it's beginning to not sound like a configuration issue, but like an infection. Personally in a situation like that I prefer to backup what I can and then reformat and reinstall. Perhaps you can try that on a free partition and see if you've avoided a repeat of the problem.

[e to the x]

its a laptop so there is no free partition. i'll just back up his data to a DVD and do a restore. slightly disappointed that NOD didn't catch anything...ad-aware was a bust too.

[Killajb]

yeah sounds like a infection

Grab this http://malwarebytes.org/ and install it and try to run it !!! in safemode

[NT50]

There are times that NOD might catch it but the user clicks continue instead of terminate.