I don't know if anyone else has seen these issues or not, but at the
request of some people I've talked to, I'm sharing what I know. In the
last few weeks, we've had a rash of student laptops that can't seem to
keep the address they were assigned by DHCP, or they repeatedly drop and
re-request a new DHCP address. In quite a few cases, Winsock corruption
was the reason for the problem.
In the September 21st issue of PC Magazine, reporter Bill Machrone
reported on an added effect of spyware: corruption of the Winsock stack
under Windows XP. This can cause some odd effects, including
intermittant release/renew of IP addresses, a general inability to
connect to the web when all hardware drivers are working normally, or
odd errors when running a networked application such as ""An operation
was attempted on something that is not a socket". His proposed cure is
to reset the Winsock stack and related TCP/IP entries in the registry.
To do this, check out
http://www.spychecker.com/program/winsockxpfix.html
a utility which does a partial reset on the Winsock stack. Microsoft
also has some proposed solutions for this problem. First, manually
editing the registry to completely remove the Winsock and TCP/IP stack,
then reinstalling it from the CD. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811259
for the details on this procedure. This corruption is the result of
spyware and adware removal which does not cleanly remove additions to
the TCP/IP stack and Winsock settings. While rare on Windows 2000
machines, there is some additional information on how to reset related
entries on both a Win2K and WinXP system at:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=817571
An additional procedure for reseting the IP stack and related registry
entries WITHOUT completely removing and reinstalling TCP/IP, see also :
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=299357
which give you a command line method using the Netshell (netsh) to
reset registry entries related to the stack in a manner similar to what
you do when you remove and reinstall TCP/IP.
We've had almost twenty cases of this in the last three weeks at the
law college. In all but three of them, resetting the Winsock stack
resolved the problem. I hope others find this information useful.
John A. Resotko
Head of Systems Administration
Michigan State University College of Law
208 Law College Building
East Lansing, MI 48824-1300
email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 517-432-6836
Fax: 517-432-6861
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