No Nic Card Displayed In Network Connections

[nekton]

I have this WinXP Home computer with SP1 that had a bad case of malware (you name it, it had it).

Even before that though, when I opened up Network Connections the ethernet card was not displayed. This is still the case after the malware has been removed.

I can get to the Internet through a browser. When I open the Windows Task Manager under the Networking tab I see the adapter and the state is "Operational". It states the network card is "Intel® PRO/100 VE Network Connection #2 - Packet Scheduler Miniport".

Other interesting behavior is that when I click on My Computer I get the flash light for about 30 seconds. Doing a:

NET STOP STISVC

SC CONFIG STISVC START= DISABLED

at the command prompt did not improve things. Once I get the My Computer window up, drilling down through folders is quick. Opening the My Documents from the desktop directly is also quick.

Also, bringing up the web browser (IE) is quick, but content is retrieved slowly from web sites.

Not necessarily pertinet to the discussion, but for the sake of completeness, before I got this machine an "expert" had set up this computer to share a large number of directories with another XP Home computer. I have deleted all these shares in My Network Places. The problems I describe above existed before and after I deleted those share points. I have a feeling some other tweaks were made by this "expert" for networking purposes. I admittedly, unlike my predecessor, am not a Windows networking expert. Noob would be an exageration.

Is there other information that I would be presenting or looking for? Let me know.

Thanks.

nekton

[Besttechie]

I'm talking to nekton in chat, so far, what I have suggested it is that he try another NIC. Feel free to post any more ideas you may have.

B

[nekton]

Adding a new NIC card did not resolve the problem. The new NIC card (not the built in one described in the original post) worked, showed up in the Task Manager Networking tab, but did not appear in the Network Connections window.

I have since gone in and removed the adapters via the Device Manager, rebooted the card and allowed WinXP to find the new devices (the built in NIC and the PCI NIC I added) which it has done.

More interesting developments in doing this.

#1) Microsoft Antispyware Alert tells me it has detected a new LSP. Is this normal? I guess I never tried to remove a NIC card and add it back in when MSASP was installed.

#2) ipconfig at the command prompt tells me there are two NIC cards installed. The one plugged into the ethernet is listed as operational, the other is listed as non-operational. What is interesting here is that the Ethernet adapters are listed as such:

Ethernet adapter {A921E8B8-80AC-4A9C-BE3E-A1E50157FB63}:

Connection-specific DNS suffix:

IPE Address....

All information about the IP address and the default gateway on my private net is listed correctly.

and

Ethernet adapter { D3C8052E-C2CD-49AF-98B1-F07EF9855054}:

Media State.....: Media disconnected

The media is in fact disconnected.

But what the heck are those hex strings all about?

nekton

[murtu52]

well, it could be that your motherboard could be messed up, but i doubt it. However, just to be safe, please try putting the current NIC into a different computer, if possible. Thanks

[nekton]

I will see if I can try the NIC card in another computer. I suspect something is wrong with the software installation, but am not sure what. There are a number of suspicious issues that keep popping up like the NIC cards giving those hex strings.

The latest is when I try to run the command

netsh int ip reset

and I get error message:

WARNING: Could not obtain host information from machine [sTUDIO]. Some commands may not be available. Class not registered.

Does this give any clues? I am very close to just reformating the entire thing which is something I have not yet done with a computer.

Does this give anyone any clues or pointers?

nekton

[nekton]

Been awhile since I have had a chance to deal with this troublesome computer, but now I am back to focusing on it. Here is the latest update.....

Originally I was unable to see the network connection icons. I needed to get to these so I could verify that the IP settings were all what I thought they should be as I thought the slow opening of My Computer was related.

It was recommended to me in the besttechie IRC channel to install Service Pack 2 (SP2). After doing the requiste backups I did install SP2 from a CD that I had gotten from Microsoft. The result was no change. I could not see the network icons, My Computer still opened very slowly and Internet Explorer had a very long delay between entering the URL of a web page and the display of that web page's content.

After more googling and search the MS KB, I found this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;825826

I went through each of the steps although in several instances it was not necessary (registry values were already correctly set, services already stopped, etc.). After restarting the computer the network icons were there!!!! Something in this list of steps did the trick!

I did a "repair" of my network adapter which now was visible in the Network Connections window and reviewed the settings from the "status" drop done menu item of the adapter's network icon. The settings all looked good.

I double clicked on My Computer (the reason I originally was trying to verify that there was not some weird network misconfiguration) to see if it would quickly display its contents. Nope. Same old, same old.

I did a bunch of additional things:

#1 Disabled Indexing service. No change

#2 Disabled WIA per http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;819017

No change.

#3 Made the registry change per Kelly's Korner (right hand side of item 157) at this link http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm No change.

#4 Under Folder Options, I "unticked" Automatically search for network folders and printers. No change.

I was able to successfully run the

netsh int ip reset

command without the errors I was getting before. However, this had no effect on either my slow My Computer opening problem or slow Internet Explorer problem.

I have also tested the network card in another computer as murtu52 suggested. This did not help either of the two remaining problems -- My Computer displays its contents after a long delay and Internet Explorer displays web content after a long delay (a few minutes for both).

Interestingly, I discovered something about IE. When I enter an address such as www.msn.com I have to wait the usual few minutes before the content is displayed. Task Manager shows no activity on the adapter or the CPU after an initial burst of activity one would expect. However, if I enter http://www.msn.com the site's content is displayed as rapidly as I would expect. This works in all cases.

I have no idea what is going on or how the IE http:// prefix might have some effect on the My Computer (or even if it is related).

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks!

nekton

[jmastro]

...

Interestingly, I discovered something about IE. When I enter an address such as www.msn.com I have to wait the usual few minutes before the content is displayed. Task Manager shows no activity on the adapter or the CPU after an initial burst of activity one would expect. However, if I enter http://www.msn.com the site's content is displayed as rapidly as I would expect. This works in all cases.

I have no idea what is going on or how the IE http:// prefix might have some effect on the My Computer (or even if it is related).

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks!

nekton

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[bearskin]

...

Interestingly, I discovered something about IE. When I enter an address such as www.msn.com I have to wait the usual few minutes before the content is displayed. Task Manager shows no activity on the adapter or the CPU after an initial burst of activity one would expect. However, if I enter http://www.msn.com the site's content is displayed as rapidly as I would expect. This works in all cases.

I have no idea what is going on or how the IE http:// prefix might have some effect on the My Computer (or even if it is related).

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks!

nekton

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I had a similar problem no spyware, no viruses, no nothing strange.

And before reformating advise I finally found a solution.

IT all happend after installing SP2 in my XP.

My windows update didn't workd, was telling me there was an error and that reregistrying must be done, but it didn't worked.

Finally I came throug a Patch of MSXML4.DLL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en

that allow me to run win update (though i had nothing to update)

After rebooting all worked fine!

Hope it helps!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[murtu52]

I believe the reason your computer speedily access http://www.msn.com and very slowly accesses www.msn.com is because of something called the URL searchhook. What this does is it takes the domain name (http://www.msn.com) and turns it into its IP address. I believe that www.msn.com first needs to be turned into http://www.msn.com before it can we translated into its IP address, so the more work for the URL Searchhook causes more time to be lost. Perhaps, i'm not too sure about this...