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Who Ya Gonna Call?

Members of the ISP-Tech list try to solve a connection problem.

On the ISP-Tech list in February, SY posted this plea for suggestions about a "once in a blue moon" problem:

"I have a strange problem: I connect to the Internet and everything seems fine. None of the standard programs — telnet, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Netscape — seem to work, but when I try to go to a site by either IP number or DNS I get error messages. I've deleted all the network components, uninstalled and reinstalled DUN, and everything else I know to do. I can ping everything by either IP number or DNS and I can ping from one of our servers to the machine and it works. Any clues what is keeping everything but ping from communicating?"

A number of respondents believed the problem lay in the operating system:

[PF suggested] "Run a system meter and see if you are out of resources. Get all of the latest patches for Win 9x and get them on your system."

[TW wrote] "I've run into this problem with Win95 and Win98 with Fortress installed. The problem persists even with Fortress disabled. I have had to completely remove Fortress to fix the problem. An OS reinstall (with Fortress still installed, but disabled) did not fix the problem. I don't know if this is the problem, but you might want to check to see if any security software has been installed on the machine."

Other respondents suggested that the problem might be defective or foreign socket files:

[TB wrote] "You need to wipe any rogue socket services on the computer in any directory. Sprynet and some versions of Family tree maker have their own that conflict with Windows Socket Services.

[JL offered this idea] "First search the hard drive for *sock*.* and delete all of them. Go to a machine that works, search again, note their location, copy them to a disk and put them on the defective system. Reboot; fixed."

Another respondent offered a slightly different solution:

[Dave wrote] "In those situations, I typically find that there is a problem with wsock32.dll — it's in the wrong directory, missing, or corrupt. Try extracting a new copy or upgrade DUN, if a newer version is available. Reinstalling TCP/IP does not tend to fix problems like these."

SY tried the various suggestions, and reported back:

"I did an SFC and told it to restore wsock32.dll but I still get all the same error messages. I'm picking up a USB Network Card in the morning so I can plug this machine into the LAN, download all the updates and see what happens. But if anyone has any other ideas as to corrupt files or registry setting, I would be interested to hear them. It's one thing to fix a file by installing 20 updates but at very least I would like to know what caused the problem in the first place."

 —End