I'm not sure where to start. This problem started yesterday, suddenly, without any changes to hardware, new software installations or changes to firewall / av settings. Thing is, my friend had this exact problem about 6 months ago - he suffered for two weeks, all the while scouring support fora for solutions (to problems that sounded similar, since he couldn't find any mention of his problem) and trying anything and everything - then he just gave up and reformatted.
I'm running XP SP2 on an Athlon 4600+ with 1GB of RAM. I use NOD32 with updated definitions, Comodo Personal Firewall, a custom HOSTS file (from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm) and surf mostly with Firefox. As I said, no recent changes to anything. I used to run Spybot once a week but it only ever found trackcookies, so I was lulled into a false sense of security... if indeed my problem is caused by malware.
THE PROBLEM:
This problem comes and goes, but mostly it's here (80% of time), and it's unbearable.
Something is wrong with the way my entire OS is connecting to the internet. My impression is that connections are successful only after several retries.
When browsing (both browsers) this affects everything: 60% of the time when I type an address (or open a link or try to use the searchbar) I immediatly get the "The page cannot be displayed" page, then I need to hit Go or Refresh anywhere between 3 and 20 times before the browser begins the normal "Waiting..." "Connecting to..." "Transferring..." process.
When pages DO load, they contain anywhere between 90 and 0 percent of the images they should (the rest are broken) and often the pages are loaded without their stylesheets and are thus rendered illegible. To view them properly I need to reload five, ten times, each time by clicking reload multiple times until the browser responds.
As I said, this affects not only browsers. Filezilla needs multiple retries to connect to perfectly operational servers, Spybot needed me to hit "Download all updates" about 50 times before, one by one, each of the 5 files was procured (once it connect it can up/download large files without problem and in habitual speeds) without a "bad checksum" error.
Adaware's update dialogue box had me clicking back and forth for a minute before it connected and downloaded the update without a hitch. Emule needs me to double click a server's name four or five times, showing me this:
13/03/2007 01:49:15: Error while connecting to rohan (212.25.103.178:4232): Error 10038: An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.
13/03/2007 01:49:15: Fatal Error while trying to connect. Internet connection might be down
...before it agrees to connect as if there's no problem.
I might be missing some other horrible symptoms, but you see how this a nightmare. Even writing this post (in notepad, of course, foreseeing the dozen submit>back>new>paste>submit cycles I'll have to go through) and uploading the file was an ordeal...
WHAT I DID SO FAR:
I've stumbled upon this page:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic50981.html
I didn't have the whole day to invest in this, but I did an online scan with BitDefender (my problem prevented the operation of the other three housecall engines) and removed a thing or two, I ran Spybot and Adaware and AVG, cleaned cookies, cache, prefetch... and for 40 minutes after a restart I actually thought the problem was gone. Now I'm here :-((
If you guys conclude that I should format, I will, but I want to know how to avoid this repeating.
Attached is the HiJackThis_v2.exe log file from today. I know I haven't followed all the steps yet, but I thought maybe it contains a clue...
I'm running XP SP2 on an Athlon 4600+ with 1GB of RAM. I use NOD32 with updated definitions, Comodo Personal Firewall, a custom HOSTS file (from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm) and surf mostly with Firefox. As I said, no recent changes to anything. I used to run Spybot once a week but it only ever found trackcookies, so I was lulled into a false sense of security... if indeed my problem is caused by malware.
THE PROBLEM:
This problem comes and goes, but mostly it's here (80% of time), and it's unbearable.
Something is wrong with the way my entire OS is connecting to the internet. My impression is that connections are successful only after several retries.
When browsing (both browsers) this affects everything: 60% of the time when I type an address (or open a link or try to use the searchbar) I immediatly get the "The page cannot be displayed" page, then I need to hit Go or Refresh anywhere between 3 and 20 times before the browser begins the normal "Waiting..." "Connecting to..." "Transferring..." process.
When pages DO load, they contain anywhere between 90 and 0 percent of the images they should (the rest are broken) and often the pages are loaded without their stylesheets and are thus rendered illegible. To view them properly I need to reload five, ten times, each time by clicking reload multiple times until the browser responds.
As I said, this affects not only browsers. Filezilla needs multiple retries to connect to perfectly operational servers, Spybot needed me to hit "Download all updates" about 50 times before, one by one, each of the 5 files was procured (once it connect it can up/download large files without problem and in habitual speeds) without a "bad checksum" error.
Adaware's update dialogue box had me clicking back and forth for a minute before it connected and downloaded the update without a hitch. Emule needs me to double click a server's name four or five times, showing me this:
13/03/2007 01:49:15: Error while connecting to rohan (212.25.103.178:4232): Error 10038: An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.
13/03/2007 01:49:15: Fatal Error while trying to connect. Internet connection might be down
...before it agrees to connect as if there's no problem.
I might be missing some other horrible symptoms, but you see how this a nightmare. Even writing this post (in notepad, of course, foreseeing the dozen submit>back>new>paste>submit cycles I'll have to go through) and uploading the file was an ordeal...
WHAT I DID SO FAR:
I've stumbled upon this page:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic50981.html
I didn't have the whole day to invest in this, but I did an online scan with BitDefender (my problem prevented the operation of the other three housecall engines) and removed a thing or two, I ran Spybot and Adaware and AVG, cleaned cookies, cache, prefetch... and for 40 minutes after a restart I actually thought the problem was gone. Now I'm here :-((
If you guys conclude that I should format, I will, but I want to know how to avoid this repeating.
Attached is the HiJackThis_v2.exe log file from today. I know I haven't followed all the steps yet, but I thought maybe it contains a clue...
