4dW4R3 is t3h SUXX!

A little hacker lingo to express my frustration with Adware and technical support. Little Sister's computer lost all network connectivity on Thursday. I make the hour's drive to her apartment on Saturday, go out to an early dinner with her, and spend six hours trying to get the thing working. A brief sign of hope when the network is back after a system restore. Then while running AdAware the system goes into auto-shutdown mode and reboots. I run adaware again, system goes into auto-shutdown again. Set up Adaware to come on before everything else as the system is counting down to reboot. Adaware runs after reboot. Finds something like 320 instances of adware. Poor little sister is so trusting. She didn't even think anything was really out of the ordinary when five ads popped up as soon as she opened Internet Explorer.

So I zap adware like mad. Then after Adaware closes: NO NETWORK CONNECTIVITY! System restore can't see far back enough to restore the network, either. It's 10:00 pm, I call it a night and take her computer home with me. Finally found the solution last night:

Problem: The computer has lost network connectivity.

Symptom: When entering ipconfig /renew at the command prompt, one receives the message "An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket"

Diagnosis: Adware or another program has inserted another layer between the user and the TCP/IP Winsock system. If the installation or removal of the software is bug-prone, network connectivity can be lost.

Solution: Download WinsockXPFix.exe from the internet on another machine and run it on the broken machine, after backing up said machine's registry as a precaution. Network connectivity will be restored.

Both Comcast and Dell technical support didn't realize the problem after they were told about the wierd ipconfig error message. I'm sending them e-mails informing them of the problem and the solution.

As for little sister? She's going to be running Adaware very often from now on. And maybe Opera instead of Internet Explorer, too.