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went round to look at my mate's dad's pc tonight coz he is unable to connect to t'internet at all of late. on startup there's 4 errors about missing DLLs (which i later searched for and found they were spyware), i then noticed loads of dodgy looking toolbars etc, and on opening a browser window it tried to connect to some highly dodgy-looking URL, but couldn't because no connection. Everything is connected right and the network card lights were showing traffic, and it had an IP (I believe NTL allocates an IP on connection? thus proving there is some kind of connection), but couldn't ping anything.

the guy had no firewall, apparently he uninstalled zonealarm coz it was annoying! a virusscan with Nortarse showed 45 cases of spyware which it couldnt delete so i nipped home and downloaded spybot and adaware, run those on his machine, adaware found over 1600 critical objects! then spybot found nother 60, but even after deleting all those, then cancelling all dodgy-looking startup processes in msconfig, still no net connection

have now resorted to a windows reinstall (he had disabled system restore too ), but was just wondering if anyone had any ideas what it was?

could be anything. ive mended a few pcs recently from friends that have been riddled with spyware and viruses. in such instances a total reinstall is probably the way to go, its what i did and resulted in happy friends once more.

what was the ip address he had been allocated, maybe it was on an internal range or maybe windows firewall (assuming he had xp) was blocking his connection or maybe his poota was spamming everyone around him it didnt have time for a lowly net connection