Hey folks, I ran across a Sony VAIO laptop today in a very odd situation. O.S. is WinXP Home. Essentially the end user complained that the laptop couldn't browse over the wireless network. After some amount of testing, I determined that TCP/IP was simply in an odd state. What happened was this: The WAP was set up to give an address over DHCP, but whenever the wireless card would request an address at boot up, the only one received was a APIPA address (169.x.x.x). (For those who aren't sure, this is basically a stock address that is assigned to an adapter when a DHCP server is unavailable.) Here's the kicker: When I tried to renew the adapter manually via IPCONFIG /RENEW, the received the following error: An error occurred while renewing interface local area connection: an operation was attempted on something that is not a socket. Wow. Ok, so the adapter is messed up, right? Nope. It turns out that _all_ adapters behave this way. (There is a wired NIC and 1394 network card in this computer as well.) So, I asked the end user: "Have you changed anything recently." And they tell me they had installed ONTRACK's System Suite 4.0, but that it had made the system unstable so they uninstalled it. I then find this MSKB article, which says that when McAfee's Personal Firewall is uninstalled via Add/Remove Programs, TCP/IP functionality is broken. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q316522& On a whim, I reinstall OT's System Suite and activate the firewall. Suddenly, TCP/IP works. The adapters are pulling IP addresses. I uninstall OT and it's all broken again. I follow the notes in this MSKB article which explains how to reset TCP/IP via Netsh. I generate a log that proves to me that TCP/IP has been "reset," but this produces no joy. Works with OT's firewall, doesn't without. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q299357& For the moment, I've left the user's PC working with OT installed. I have put in a request to Ontrack to research this. Anyone have any thoughts? Cheers, Mike Whalen -- Cheers, Mike Whalen The Computer Valet E-Mail: [log in to unmask] Phone: (978) 670-5967 PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml