Ethernet connection w/ "Limited or no connectivity"

I recently took a friends laptop to clean up it up and make it run smoother/more secure. It was a dell inspirion and needless to say had a lot of junk on it. I slimmed it down and gave it back to her in what I thought was in perfect working order, however she hasn't been able to get online since. I dropped by her place at lunch and fiddled around briefly and basically her ethernet connection is connecting to her DSL modem but it has "limited or no connectivity". It seems that packets are being sent but there is no resolution of dhcp or dns issues.

I checked and the connection is set to obtain everything automatically. I also plugged the same ethernet cable into my laptop which I had brought with me and it connected with no problems, so the problem is definitely with her computer.

I've taken the laptop with me and will be trying to figure it out when I get home from work tonight but I figured I'd try and solicit some suggestions here as I'm a bit stumped.

She has Verizon dsl at her apartment and has a lot of software on the computer associated with connecting with her laptop's modem, as opposed to the ethernet jack. As her current setup uses the ethernet jack I had disabled the modem in the bios (renabling didn't help). My question here is: could any of this software be somehow confusing the ethernet connection? One thing in her Network Connections that I had seen before was, in addition to the modem, ethernet, firewire and wireless connection, a connection called something like Broadband mini PPPoE connection. I didn't know what this was and thought it might be some sort of bridging between her laptop's modem and ethernet (an uneducated guess really). Trying to connect this connection brings up a dialing dialog, and with the modem enabled it seems to acually connect, though nothing is plugged into the modem and still nothing resolves. Personally I've never used anything but ethernet and wireless so I feel a little lost with old school modems.

In any event I'm functioning under the working assumption right now of probably uninstalling and reinstalling the networking portions of her OS (Windows XP Home w/ SP2), so perhaps my greatest hope was to get some suggestions/recommendations on doing that.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Your PPPoe is needed for dsl connections. its the port that allows the data for username/password and authentication to the server and the rest of data flow for that matter... that PPPoe miniport needs to be there for DSL to operate

try to reinstall the dsl cd ? that might take care of whatever you did that you shouldnt have.

four4875 said:

try to reinstall the dsl cd ? that might take care of whatever you did that you shouldnt have.

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I'll give that a shot. Question though: If that PPPOE connection and/or the dsl software was needed to use her DSL connection how come I was able to connect with my laptop with no problems?

Ok I am not able to reinstall the Verizon software. It hangs when trying to detect the current setup -- possibly because I'm not at her apartment and not connected to her modem, however...

I'm also unable to connect to my network, which is not dsl. I get the same problem:

Local Are Connection 2
Speed: 100 Mbps
Status: Limited or no connectivity

...

I also tried putting a static ip, dns server and it lists the connection as connected, however I'm unable to resolve anything outside my LAN (though I can ping internally fine).

did you trying unpluging power from the modem/router

try removing everything to do with the network you can, then reinstall it all, the drivers and such. it seems somthing is up with the adapter and maybe reinstalling the drivers would help, posibly find updated ones.

Try running the network setup wizard again, it never hurts. Choose the option that the computer is connected remotely thru another computer, even if it is not. If this does not work, run it again with the connected directly setting. I have found that the 'connected indirectly' setting works most of the time, regardess.

meionm said:

did you trying unpluging power from the modem/router

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To clarify: I am actually trying to get the ethernet jack to work on my home lan, which connects to the internet via acable modem (my reasoning being if my laptop worked through its ethernet connection at her place, if I can get her laptop's ethernet connection to work on my network then we should be fine).

four4875 said:

try removing everything to do with the network you can, then reinstall it all, the drivers and such. it seems somthing is up with the adapter and maybe reinstalling the drivers would help, posibly find updated ones.

Click to expand...

I've been trying to do this but I've been a bit frustrated. I've tried removing the networking components of windows and then reinstalling them but it seems that it simply restores them (through the add/remove progams control panel). I've treid uninstalling the ethernet adapter the the device manager and then rebooting to have it be reinstalled, but again it just seems to restore not reinstall it. I'll try looking online for update drivers for it though.

Packrat said:

Try running the network setup wizard again, it never hurts. Choose the option that the computer is connected remotely thru another computer, even if it is not. If this does not work, run it again with the connected directly setting. I have found that the 'connected indirectly' setting works most of the time, regardess.

Click to expand...

I've tried running the network setup wizard, trying different variations, all with no luck.

Some further info:

I get the same error when using either the ethernet adapter or the wireless adapter. The connection seems to be established but is listed as limited or no connectivity.

If I put in a static ip I'm able to ping other computers on my lan by ip address. I'm also able to ping 127.0.0.1 but not localhost.

Running ipconfig -renew (after -release) immediately gives back an error along the lines of "The support for the specified socket type does not exist in this address family."

Further the event log lists numerous errors along the lines of " IPRIP was unable to create a socket for address..."

Figure out what lan chip she has on her mobo, find some drivers online for it and try installing those. Remove the old ones first then install the new ones.

Long shot here, check to see if IP6 is active in the advanced tab of the network connections properties. Screwed me up for a few hours.

I'd bet you removed some spyware when you did your maintenance. Unfortunately, a bunch of spyware installs itself into windows LSP. So, when you remove it, you break networking.

If you open a command prompt and run "ipconfig /renew" does it time out immediately and give you an error message saying something about an operation being performed on something that is not a socket?

There's a utility that may help fix the problem here

Jason said:

I'd bet you removed some spyware when you did your maintenance. Unfortunately, a bunch of spyware installs itself into windows LSP. So, when you remove it, you break networking.

If you open a command prompt and run "ipconfig /renew" does it time out immediately and give you an error message saying something about an operation being performed on something that is not a socket?

There's a utility that may help fix the problem here

Click to expand...

You. Are. The. Man!

That was exactly the problem I was having and the uitility you linked to fixed it right up. Thanks so much man, I was getting worried I'd have to tell my friend she needed to reformat

Thankyou, you are a complete star.