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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