OK, normally the onboard NIC’s never fail…is the NIC giving you a green light when you plug your Network cable into it? you said it has been getting Blue Screen errors from hardware, has there been any other hardware installed (PCI slots) that you know of? I would uninstall that NIC, use LiveUpdate that is provided from MSI to check for the latest driver on that NIC and go from there…i dont think winsockfix is going to fix your problem due to the fact that you are not able to use IPCONFIG, but you never know that is a great program to have….get the latest driver for it from liveupdate, if that doesn’t fix it uninstall it completely, reboot and reinstall it…pull out any PCI slot hardware from the machine and then see what happens…you could be having an IRQ

OK, normally the onboard NIC’s never fail…is the NIC giving you a green light when you plug your Network cable into it? you said it has been getting Blue Screen errors from hardware, has there been any other hardware installed (PCI slots) that you know of? I would uninstall that NIC, use LiveUpdate that is provided from MSI to check for the latest driver on that NIC and go from there…i dont think winsockfix is going to fix your problem due to the fact that you are not able to use IPCONFIG, but you never know that is a great program to have….get the latest driver for it from liveupdate, if that doesn’t fix it uninstall it completely, reboot and reinstall it…pull out any PCI slot hardware from the machine and then see what happens…you could be having an IRQ issue, though i throughly DOUBT that since XP and the new boards are very good at assigning IRQ, keep posted…
josh

Thanks, still not there yet!

I’d forgotten winsockfix, have seen it recommended many times but since I wasn’t having the problem I filed it too deep in memory!

Tried it, wouldn’t back up the registry but it reported making the changes successfully, but no change on reboot. Tried it several times, no luck. Have not yet tried it with the NIC disabled, as the author suggested.

Put that and many other tools on a CD, but the spyware tools largely wouldn’t install – hm, are the installation files actually corrupt, or is there some beast running even in safe mode to prevent my installing these tools?! Paranoid? Perhaps.

Since my traditional approach of running spyware/malware/AV tools and looking through the Registry don’t seem to be getting me anywhere, I’ll try re-installing the network interface as josh suggests. Ran LiveUpdate when I first built the thing, so we’re probably up-to-date but I’ll try it again to be sure.

I’d like to eliminate the hardware before I look at formatting and re-installing, would hate to go through that only to find XP was actually fine. Perhaps I’ll try booting Linux to see if the network appears – if so, that would seem to clear the hardware…

I’m going to walk away from it all for a while, perhaps there will be some other good ideas when I get back!

-Bob

Every time I have had this trouble, I would do the following.

* Get the PC to reboot properly (Ie, start it up, then reboot it straight away)
* Disabling the network connection and re-enabling it again
* Changing the properties of the TCP/IP stack to obtain an IP address (if it is not already, other wise manually set one) and then setting the properties back to the correct settings.

From the sounds of it you may want to try the following. Check to see if the client has accidently installed any spyware/adware/etc, on to their PC. Check by looking at the add/remove program panel. Also check to see if the PC hasnt been infected with a virus. You could try to do a system restore to a time before the system was crashing a lot.

Other wise you could reinstall the system again. But I would do this as a last resort.

As somewhat of a follow-on to nephi1, I’d also suggest (If the disable/enable doesn’t work) to actually remove the network adapter from the device manager, and then let plug and play “find” it again.

That’s also helped in several cases.

BobKberg

Have you change the Patch cable from the wall to the computer? have you verified the cat5 line with a tester at all??

My suggestion was very simple.
Shut down the computer, plug-in another network card, turn-on the computer and install the driver.
If the new network card was working fine after few days then I will suggest you let it work and not to change anything.

I’m not familiar with MSI boards but if the “N” mean Nforce then download the latest chipset package from Nvidia. I had some Compaqs with Nvidia chipsets that dropped the network card and it ended up being the version of the driver that had a problem. I would also run Memtest86 because of the blue screens and software that won’t install. I’ve had lots of bad memory since DDR400 came out and I’ve only been using high end memory for a long time. Corsair, OCZ and Crucial. A lot of them won’t run at advertized clock settings.

Sounds as though it could be a corrupt winsock stack, can be caused by incorrect/incomplete removal of some spyware/virus. See Microsoft article 811259 for checks and correction.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811259

Sorry for wraparound make sure you copy it all.

I have recently run into this several times on new computers, is th OS XP? The service pack two has a firewall built into it, if any other firewall was in place before the service pack upgrade you now have two firewalls competing for power and the NIC will not work,
check to see if your firewall is on, if it is turned off but still on in the display screen you have a conflict with your firewalls. This is very common on Dell computers being shipped. The whole system needs to be reloaded if this is the case as neither removal of software firewalls will allow network traffic, even with them turned off.

Good luck