a weired Internet issue under WXP, SP2

Hello folks!

I was asked to resolve one odd issue with the Internet access problem. I am still looking for the solution and some help or ideas would be appreciated.

The symptoms:

The issue:
The system and connectivity:
I think this could not happen just by itself. Everything used to work just fine several days ago. I've checked to make sure that this is not the firewall issue.

I'll try to ping the router under the restricted user today though. I've launched "gpedit.msc" to check if there were any changes done to the group policies configuration. Everything seems intact there. Please note that I access that computer remotely.

Any ideas or suggestions?
Thank you.

life's good! The Internet issue was caused by the WebHancer. You can read a nice article about it at http://cexx.org/webhancer.htm.

The symptoms were really weired (that's what helped me to locate the true cause since that became clear that the system cannot possibly do any such thing). The pinging was going fine with one abnormality. Whenever the program tried to get information about its connection, a junk IP address was retrieved! (I was using my security tool for the examination and basically was running two cmd.exe executing similar commands under different restrictions level to compare the output). As soon as I saw that, I've downloaded and scanned the system with the "AD-Aware SE Personal".

The rest is clear...

A good place to start with most internet related problems, is a spyware scan.

snafumaster said:

A good place to start with most internet related problems, is a spyware scan.

Click to expand...

You're right. I usually tune the security up that way so my computers have no issues of the sort. That wasn't my computer after all and I haven't dealt with any problem like that for a very good while. Anyway, I should have scanned the system in the first place...