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A suggestion if you lose all Internet / network connectivity: Combofix by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/16/2012, 3:36am PDT My Optiplex 740 worked just fine until one day the networking stopped. The wireless adapter could see the router but kept getting an IP address of 0.0.0.0 which meant networking didn't work at all. I looked at suggestions including IPCONFIG /release IPCONFIG /renew but the renew wouldn't work because it was telling me the RPC service wasn't working. I tried a few other things This article: techspot.com/community/topics/no-ip-rpc-server-unavailable-need-help.145304 was very helpful, and directed me to a free fix program called Combofix. As the article states, it can be downloaded here or here. I copied it to a flash drive, moved it to the other computer, and ran it. I discovered there was a rootkit that had nested in the TCP/IP stack, and Combofix had to do some nasty fixes and really serious work to remove it. Three reboots later, and I noticed that the wireless network card was now getting a valid IP address in the "network 10" reserved group range (192.168.0.101) (I have the router give that wireless card's mac address a fixed address (I try to do this with all devices which are permanently on the network, this way my network printer will always be at the same place, same for my Buffalo network storage device.) Combofix is a fairly spare program that after it unpacks its files, runs in what looks like a console window. What the program lacks in conversation, it makes up for with pure power in fixing things. It even discovered that my computer is missing windowssystem32driverscdrom.sys ; now I know why the computer can't see my Blu-Ray burner (that disappeared several weeks back and I haven't had the patience to track down the problem.) It's nice to have my computer back on the network after being offline for the better part of, oh, I don't know, a couple weeks, probably. This also says something about the stupid guy who wrote this rootkit. Nobody seriously writes rootkits or trojans just to shut people down or damage their system, that's stupid and a waste of time. Typically this stuff gets written so you can turn someone else's Internet-connected PC into a zombie as part of a botnet so you can sell access to it to do various things like attack other computers or blackmail people. Killing someone's Internet connection doesn't give you a damn thing and since it can't report itself, you'll never even know if it did anything. It is ridiculous to develop something this complicated and not somehow figuring a way to monetize it. Which you can't do if you damage their Internet connectivity. Well, I have to say this: whoever developed Combofix did a nice job.

A suggestion if you lose all Internet / network connectivity: Combofix by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/16/2012, 3:36am PDT