Had a friend's Dell 5100 laptop with WinXP that wouldn't connect to the Internet. Using AdAware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Hijack This, I corrected almost 300 entries. Still couldn't connect to the Internet with IE using a Dell 1150 Mobile wireless PC card, even though I could access my wlan router's administration page.

Hmmm, strange. Accomplished a WinXP repair (installed over the existing installation). No joy. I could ping the other computers in my LAN, but couldn't ping anything on the WAN. Checked for Winsock corruption using Netdiag. Winsock was good. Installed Mozilla and tried it. No joy. Removed and re-installed all of the networking hardware in Device Manager. No joy. Removed and re-installed the TCP/IP stack. No joy. Tried straight hardwire ethernet cable from my modem to the laptop (taking the router out of the loop). No joy. Installed WinXP, deleting the previous install, but without deleting the partition or formatting the drive. Still no joy. Could still ping the LAN, but not the WAN.

Now I'm starting to get more than a little pi**ed. I've never used my Knoppix disk as a rescue disk, but decided to give it a try before erasing/formatting the drive and doing yet another install.

Knoppix booted up perfectly, finding my wlan card, connected to the LAN, and voila! connected to the Internet the first time! OK, now we're getting somewhere - we don't have a hardware problem, which was starting to worry me because everything's integrated in the laptop.

Or did we? I take the Knoppix CD out and re-boot Windows. I can now access the Internet. Now what the hell!?

Anbody have an idea of what might have happened here? Did Knoppix flip a (hardware) bit or logic gate that was sitting funny or something? It's got me baffled...

thanks