I checked my hard drive with diagnostics and it passed. At first I thought a virus infection was not involved but now I am sure I was hit. I always used SuperAntiVirus, Adaware and Norton on a regular basis since my wife downloaded an obnoxious infection which I was able to get rid of. However, I now believe I have had Win32/Alureon.H virus. From what I have researched, it hides around the windows kernel and its stealth prevents detection. A nasty one to get rid of. This virus does lead to corrupt system files, exactly what I have experienced. I know this thread is not the place to handle this virus, so I am going to mark this thread as solved. Can you suggest a good anti-virus forum? I will obtain the suggested virus checkers you mentioned and have a bigger arsenal.
OS: Windows XP Home Media 2005 SP3. Dell Demension 8400 2 g memory 320 gb hard drive Broadcom NetExtreme 57g Controller, RCA cable router, 4 port Levtron gateway (these have always worked) This desktop has worked with home networking and internet connections until recently. Now all I get is "page cannot be displayed" message in IE and I can not get my home network to show up. When I try and repair the network IP settings, I get the can not obtain IP adress and can not be repaired. The IP adress remains all zeros. Everytime I got the could not repair message, all I had to do was reboot the rounter and gateway and it always reestablished connections. But not now.  I contacted my ISP (Comcast) and they flushed winsocks and checked the software settings for networks and told me all were set correctly. When I do to Dos Cmd and ping www.yhoo.com, I get "host not found" and "Can not find RPC server" messages. Comcast then suggests contacting Dell. I went to Broadcom web site and downloaded their diagnostic program and created a bootable cd. The Broadcom NIC passed all tests. I  had to turn Restore off because of a nagging problem with Norton Antivirus detecting a low-level threat and the only way to get rid of it was to wipe out restore points because they kept triggering the alerts. I have some network drivers on a thumb drive that I reinstalled, but no help. The little taskbar network icon constantly says it is aquiring network address, but never does. I am at a complete loss in what to do now.   My biggest problem now is that I do not have any Win XP cds. I found a program that would slipstream SP3 onto a bootable cd, but it requires the OS on cd. I only have a reinstallation DVD. I have no way to check many windows files using SFC /SCANNOW. This program asks for Windows cd also. Again, I only have dvds and doesn't seem to recognize the DVD. The SFC pprogram is to verify protected window files and replace any corrupt files. I can not even run this. I am at a complete loss in how to proceed.  I also went into Services and tried to stop/start DHCP services and got error 1075 - problem with dependencies.
No network or internet