HELP for computer challenged

Technical Support Forum

I am beside myself trying to figure something out which just happened with my system. I hope some knowledgeable person or persons can suggest a fix

I have an HP desktop with Pentium4 and windows XP for home(please no comments on choice of computer, it serves it's purpose for now).

Here is the situation
Sunday 7/18 logged onto my computer, started online DSL service as usual. Firewall and virus scan thru McAffee activated.
Went and activated my anonymous tunneler (metropipe.net) to go out and anonymously surf internet.
Use mozilla and firefox which works well with the tunneler. Checked also my Yahoo account which came through from browsing on IE V6 from which I do not use a tunneler as it has some issues.

I closed out of my web browsers, all of them, decided to run my spybot and pcferret adware/spyware as I usually do.

SPYBOT was first and it captured some usualy surfing cokkie suspects, and I erased them.
Started PCFERRET next and found that the actual program was erased from my hardrive. (may have been picked up by spybot on sweep of my system and listed on the results which then were inadvertently erased by me). Went back through IE and got a link to download pcferret program for free( usually a pay program, may have been a trial freebie) and got an updated version my desktop to run.

Ran it as usual and then received an odd message I never saw on my previous versions of pcferret.. " Do you want to clean up temporary internet files and cookies now " --with a radio button that was prefilled in under "highly recommended" along with radio buttons for " NO" and also for "later"( or something like that, I am doing this from memory).

I ran it the cleanup and closed out of my session. I powered down and then restarted my computer 30 min later.

Everything was fine, connected to DSL and then went to use IE and it brought up the infamous " page not found"... at bottom with " dns error or server not found"

Tried mozilla, firefox, navigator and they all come up as blank pages .....

Does anyone have a clue to help me figure out what happened?
I called my DSL provider and they verified all is OK from their end, connections are fine. We pinged some addresses and it showed that my IP address was not showing up on their end.

They thought maybe this metropipe tunneler was the culprit and/or also the wan driver from computer. SO on the phone we uninstalled and reinstalled my wan driver. All went OK but still not able to connect out to internet.

Before I call in a PC repair person I hope someone can offer some advice. I do not want to spend all day with tech support for HP to discuss a driver that the DSL provider suspects is the blame...

what do you guys and gals think?

thanks
earn_4home
(john)

I'm no computer wiz but I would uninstall all of the virus scans and see if not having them fixes anything. If things work like how they normally were well then you found your problem. There is a whole bunch of computer wiz guys on this site but they don’t frequent this place that much. If you want I can get them in here to help you out.

Hey thanks for offering to possibly get some techs stop by and see if my problem has a fix I could undertake.

I have contacted"geeks on call" (national service, not my cut up name for tech savvy people-so no flames please) and scheduled a checkup with them but if some other techs could check out my info and suggest something I would be most grateful.

thanks

John, it seems to me that your Metropipe tunneler maybe causing the problem. But to be safe, next time you connect to the Internet, go to 'Start' > 'Run', then type in 'cmd'. This should bring up a command prompt. There, type in 'ipconfig'. This should show the status of your adapter. Make sure you have values for IP address and default gateway. If you do, then try uninstalling the tunneler. Maybe that program's settings were inadverently changed.

M.

p.s. Deleting temporary Internet files and cookies cannot cause the problem, so you are okay on that front. Infact, it is healthy to delete them once in a while.