Cannot fully connect to any network (wired or wireless)

Apologies if this belongs in another forum, but this felt the best to me.

For starters let me say that a friend of mine who is a mac user told me his mother's laptop was having issues and thought it might be infected with some malware and/or viruses and asked me to take a look. I went through the usual regimen of tools here on MajorGeeks and am fairly confident I have the machine cleaned.

However now I am unable to get his mother's laptop to connect to any networks, wireless or wired. When I attempt to connect it says it has connected, but it also always says "Identifying..." and never fully resolves a connection.

What is odd is I was able to connect and download updates from various tools so I know it was working at some point. I worry that at some point in the malware/virus removal a necessary network service may have been damaged or removed. Unfortunately I am unable to determine the exact cause.

In my attempts to troubleshoot this I attempted to flush the DNS but received an error that indicated the DNS Client service was not running which I verified. I cannot get this or the DHCP Client service to start. I know these need to be running but I can't figure out why they won't run. If anyone has any advice I would greatly appreciate it.

I am available to run any tools necessary to troubleshoot. I work in tech support so I am no stranger to computers, but networking is not my strongest area which is why I came here.

Thanks.

PS: Laptop OS is Windows Vista SP1

 

Check in the properties of the DHCP Service and make sure the dependencies are all running.

If you don't find a service that is stopped, try static ips.
Since this is a laptop, my usual fix to just give the computer a static ip might not be ideal. On a computer that connects to the network, go to the command prompt and get the ipconfig /all information. copy that information into the TCP/IP settings of the not functioning laptop but change the first IP number to something much higher up to 254. ie if the working computer's IP is 192.168.1.5, make the laptop something like 192.168.1.128. This should keep you well out of the DHCP range and avoid conflicting ip's.

Once you get connection, make sure you can reboot and connect easily still. If it's a service that is turned off, it might fail on the next boot.

 

Thanks I tried static IP and it worked.

 

Hi,

Since you state that the computer is running Vista SP1 and that it can now connect, I'd back it up and then download and install SP2, and then run Windows Update to download any post-SP2 fixes that might be available.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=16468

After that, I'd remove the static IP and re-test.

Regards,

dj

 

something that i have had happen is the network adapter if you share the internet say from the lan port but are not hooked up it will make the computer keep trying to identify on the wireless . and vice versa
A simple look at the network adapter setting should tell you if it is being shared