Vista Networking

A while ago a student brought her to laptop to me as the icons for IE, Word etc weren't working due to a virus that had been previously removed (I'm told anyway). I did a system restore and the icons were Ok but after doing that the Network card on her Vista machine now refuses to receive an IP address, it did work before the system restore.

I have tried a reset of Winsock and the IP stack but so far these haven't solved the problem, it isn't hardware related as WinPE picked up an IP without problem.

Another issue is that the event viewer service doesn't seem to run, gives me an error that the data is invalid. So I tried to save and clear the system event log but received another error saying the network path wasn't valid.
Also I couldn't manually get rid of all of the logs because they were locked by another process.


The main problem is the networking! Heeeeeelp it's been driving me nuts for ages now

have you tried removing the vista virus?
Nah but seriously, you tried removing then reinstalling the network drivers?

The virus was removed before I got to it. I have done a reinstall of the drivers, I'll go through the process again to make sure I did an uninstall though I'm fair sure I did

What antivirus software is installed on the machine? My Vista installation kept dropping internet connection and this turned out to be related to avg antivirus. When I removed that and installed an alternative antivirus it worked fine.

Try, in a CMD prompt,

netsh winsock reset

Had similar problems here with Vista laptops, and this can fix it. You'll need elevated permissions for this.

The owner of the laptop had installed Norton 360 but at that point it would still get an IP. When the system wouldn't pick up an IP I installed Sophos which removed Norton to do a different virus scan.

I have already tried resetting winsock, it didn't work :(

Have you REMOVED Norton 360 though? It has a horrible tendency to stick around after uninstall, especially the firewall which usually is set to maximum pwnage of incoming connections.

Use the norton removal tool which is available here:

Download and run the Norton Removal Tool

And forever rid the computer of that peice o rubbish.

I uninstalled the Norton evilness so thank you for the heads up on the removal tool. And I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled them, I think where I went wrong was that Vista reinstalled the old drivers automatically so I had to manually remove the .inf files.


Thanks for your help guys!

Well i too have vista from 2years. I never faced any networking problem. I am sure there is a problem in your installation method. Also i would say that Norton can surely help you in correct sense. Or you can hire a new Windows 7. Its too very good and there is hardly any complain of networking.