I wonder if there is a virus on the system that targets IP addressing. Can you go to a restore point when the computer was working, say 1 month ago?
I tried like hell to download a virus scanner. It really was seeming like that especially the manner in which the performance decayed over time. It was as if there was something in there that was eating up its ability to connect. I had gotten to TrendMicro when it was getting really slow but every time I tried to download the file it said it lost connection. Does anyone know where I can download a scanner with current updates that I can jump drive or burn to cd and take to that pc? I can't use a scanner that will need to look for updates on install because it can't connect. About 50% of the time I can get Google.com to open in a browser but just the Google logo graphic takes about 30 seconds to load. I know it's not a graphics issue because I went to a site I own that has only one sentence on the home page with no graphics and even that page takes 10-20 seconds to load. On the very rare occasion where I can get cnn.com to load it takes about 2 minutes to open that page but 99% of the time just times out and says I'm not connected.
have you try download.com? http://www.download.com/1770-2001_4-0.html?query=housecall&tag=srch&searchtype=downloads
Go through the basic TCP/IP configuration information. My guess would be that some settings got out of whack. This would explain why no networking device works properly. There are some software tools that you can buy which will review network settings for you if you are not comfortable with doing so.
You might take the hard drive from the suspect computer and put it into a known good system in place of the CD drive. Make sure the known good system has antivirus software. Then if you start the computer the suspect drive appears as a second drive and you can virus scan the suspect drive. You might also look through the programs, and look at add/remove programs. Check to see if there are any unexpected programs installed. Sometimes people install software that causes problems.
I like this idea a lot. I already went through Add/ Remove when I uninstalled all the AOL chat crap and that stuff. The computer did formerly have Kazaa on it so it very well could be infected. Before I put that HDD in another pc I'll do an image of the C: drive in the good pc before I connect it just in case a virus comes off of the drive being scanned. I'll let you know if it works. Thanks!
You might be able to download the latest security updates from microsoft.com on another system and copy them to CD. Then put the CD in the suspect system and install the security updates. Maybe you can share the security updates out on the network and install them over the network, you wont need a CD.
Make sure the good computer is fully updated with latest antivirus dat files and security patches. If Kazaa was on the suspect drive then virus infection is a possibility. AOL software might be incompatible with some network drivers and software. Running scandisk and disk defragmenter might be a good idea.
you might want to try setting the ip address manually. look up the settings on the other machines, and match everything but the actual ip address.
It is possible something altered the hosts file. The hosts file on my Vista computer is at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. Certain entries in the hosts file can block an IP address such as the address of your router. You might compare hosts files from suspect and known good computers.