wininet.dll causing Outlook 2003, IE & more crashes

Outlook 2003 has been crashing on me, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes when I try to drag a message to a folder... I get the "has encounterd an error and needs to close" popup, and can't do anything with the program, so I hit send report. If I have "restart Outlook 2003" checked, it crashes again immediatly upon opening, if I don't, and wait a little while to open it again, it will open, and download my mail, but then as soon as I try to do something, like delete an email or something, it crashes again.
IE "soft-crashes" almost immediately every time I open the browser - by this I mean, I get the "has encountered an error and needs to close" popup, but I found that if i just drag the box down to the bottom off the screen, I can continue to browse just fine.

The details of the error report from the crash popup for explorer are:
AppName: iexplore.exe AppVer: 6.0.2900.2180 ModName: wininet.dll
ModVer: 6.0.2900.2781 Offset: 0001b810

technical details won't let me copy & paste it here.

I found the administrative tools place to view events, this is what I see for the IE crashes:
Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 6.0.2900.2180, faulting module wininet.dll, version 6.0.2900.2781, fault address 0x0001b810.

Occasionally other programs crash with similar error, faulting wininet.dll: Windows Media Player, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Excel, and when it's really acting up, Help will crash too (but then I believe it's because the Help panel acts like IE).

Similar info for all the other app's crashes - same wininet.dll fault.

Here is my system info:
Microsoft Windows XP, SP2
Internet Explorer version 6.0.2900.2180
Media Player 10.00.00.3646
DirectX 9.0 (can't find the long string)
DSL through a router
Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta running, All Windows Updates up-to-date, Norton AntiVirus running & Up-to-date, system is supposedly clean from all bugs...

I believe the problem happened when my friend recommended I install Microsoft Antispyware and get rid of Spybot S&D - when I did that, I accidentally deleted wininet.dll, and now apparently I'm using a bad version of that dll.

Here's what I've tried so far:
1) Tried re-installing Spybot S&D - result: no improvement, so I undid that.
2) Tried doing system restore to before the problem - result: no improvement, so I undid that.
3) Friend recommended re-installing IE, to get a good dll - result: impossible, XP won't let you install OVER current IE, and won't let you un-install IE if you've done service packs
4) Different friend recommended Registry Mechanic - result: didn't find any problems associated with wininet.dll, so I didn't touch anything
5) Tried to find a "good" version on the net, only one I could find was 6.0.2600.0000 - result: made svchost.exe barf on startup, so that I couldn't do anything, so I went and un-did the replacement

Don't know what to do now.
Any advice?

 

Hi and welcome to MajorGeeks.

I don't believe uninstalling Spybot is related to your problems, and your friend shouldn't have told you to remove it.

Anyway, do you have an XP SP2 CD?

If you do, go to Start, Run and type in sfc /scannow (note there is a space after sfc ) then OK and follow the prompts.

If you don't, and only have a recovery CD, read the documentation and see if there is a partition that will allow you to do a repair.

 

All I have is the manufacturer's recovery CD, XP was pre-loaded on the machine...

I have two more ideas, but one of them I don't know if it might screw things up more:
1) the other possibility that I forgot is that I also uninstalled Sygate Personal Firewall the same night - so I'm going to try downloading & installing that again - if that was the uninstall that got rid of the good dll, then maybe re-installing it will get me the good one back on... this seems like it's safe enough....
2) if that *doesn't* work, the other idea I have is, I noticed when I searched for wininet.dll on my system that some other earlier versions reside in the backup/uninstall folders for Microsoft updates that were previously installed - I'm pretty sure there's an area on the Updates site that lets you see and undo previous updates in your history, so I'm thinking that I could maybe rollback/uninstall one of those particular updates, and then re-update? But I'm sorta afraid that rolling back on Updates might make the system a little bit unstable, and hose things up even more. None of the Updates was *before* SP2, since that was the very first thing that went on here (the machine came pre-loaded with SP1 since that's what was current when it was manufactured, but SP2 was already out & the problems with it were all patched up by the time I got the computer)... but... I still don't wanna mess with this unless I have to.
Anyway, I'm gonna give idea #1 a try, although I kinda doubt it will fix everything. If anyone has any advice about idea #2, please post!
Thanks!