need help with XP Home after virus repair

[Brettreyu]

First time post here but it seemed like a great place to come to for help. Here's the story.

I get a friends computer to fix, a little Dell with Windows XP Home installed, not a big deal. It's giving BSD errors when first logged in and it has spyware and viruses up to wazoo. I boot into safe mode run a number of tools including AVG spyware edition, hiJack this, CCleaner, Spybot Search and Destroy, and a few tools for specific viruses. After spending 3-4 hours doing this everything appeared to be normal.

I booted normal and everything seemed to be fine. No more popups, no more Brave Sentry, and more importantly no more BSD. One small problem though, I didn't have access to any of the NICs installed on the system. I checked Device Manager and anything under Network Connections had an Exclamation mark with the yellow background on it. I tried to update the drivers from Dell's website but to no avail.

Event Viewer gives a few error messages relating to not being able to start IPSec and Simple TCP IP Service. I checked and lsass.exe wasn't there so I ran expand command from a command line and the file was replaced but to no avail, the error remained.

Any ideas, I'm really at a loss here? Reformatting isn't an option or I would have done it first thing. I am going to try a Repair from the XP Home cd and see if that replaces the files that I need, I think it will but you never know. Any help is appreciated.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Welcome to the Windows Forum.

With the massive cleanup you have done, it is quite possible that some infected system files have been removed. I would first try the System File Checker (sfc /scannow) before attempting a repair install.

When downloading the network adapter drivers from Dell, make 100% sure that you download the correct ones. Some Dell models are equipped with different devices, according to country or other specifications.

If you are sure that you obtained the correct drivers, what happened when you installed them? Install successful, but still exclamation marks? Can you try to uninstall them first, then install the new ones?

Also, you could try to download newer drivers from the original NIC manufacturer. I download all my drivers from Intel for my Dell machines - much newer than the Dell downloads.

You could also try to uninstall the drivers, then let Add Hardware search for the original drivers.

Please report back how it goes.