Internet wont work!

i just got back from somebody's house that i tried to fix there computer for them. the problem was that the internet would not work from them. They would get to there homepage and then a tons of popups would come up and slow down the computer sooo much that, that was the only thing that they did, go there homepage. they have a cable connection so they are always on.

this is what i did. I figured popups, run spybot. I ran spybot and it found 450 problems, so i went ahead and fixed those problems. some could not be fixed so i check the box run at next startup. I restarted and it ran and found about 35 more items that i went ahead and deleted. now here is the weird part. they can no longer get to there homepage. I restarted. No homepage. I undid what i did with spybot, put back on all the stuff that i deleted and still no homepage. Restarted again and nothing. Now the light for the cat5 connection is lite, the computer sees the connection, they have and ip address, put still nothing when i try to get to there homepage or any other page. I tried firefox instead of internet explorer and still no pages.

so i sort of messed their computer up worse then it was before, but not really since the only thing that they could do was get to there homepage.

So how can i fix their internet problem? The internet works just fine on there laptop. I gave them two options, one was to ask in the forums, so hopefully i get an answer, the second one was to just do a complete reformat. There computer probably needs it.
they have win xp home edition

re-format would prolly be good

If they had a total of 450 things that needed to be fixed/deleted by spybot then there computer must be riddle with crap. I second CheeseMan, format and start again.

that is what i was thinking. thanks for the input, i will tell them to start backing stuff up.

There should be a learning session. How to browse the internet 101. It would seem that people are clicking yes to these "You won 50 bucks! Click here to claim your prize!" It irritates me when they are always complaining about popups and such, but "havent a clue how they get there!" I think I run Ad-Aware about 2 times a month, as well as smart browsing is always a plus. But GRRR!!

Buhammot, couldn't agree with you more. Now you, me and others in this world have to go around fixing it, because we now about computers.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=307720

follow those steps if you don't want to format, alot of times you can get by fine without resorting to that.