A few days ago...

firefox won't go into my e-mail, yahoo won't search, and I can't go to MANY sites like https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default...amp;folderID=27 (need to upgrade)... IE v7 WON'T even connect to the internet nor will opera... now I have no spyware (as far as I can tell).. add-aware, spybot and ewido

I went into safemode with networking and EVERYTHING worked... but safemode = ANNOYING since everything = 1000x bigger + the top half of the screen = black (monitor doesn't like safe mode either)

So, someone told me to uninstall the ethernet and the winsock files in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\W insock
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\W insock2

which I did... but I have no clue how to uninstall the ethernet.... I got rid of the files... not the ethernet and well... I can't connect to the internet with any browser or messenger or anything... this is seriously troubling... any bright ideas?

kind of a simple answer to the problem but not sure if you tried it.....

restarting your modem and/or router

did you do that?

restart it as in shut it down? I did and it didn't work... but I guess now what the biggest problem is that I deleted the winsock files and I think that is creating another problem

restart as in un-plug for 30 seconds then plug back in

Yeah I just did... and nothing... but remember, I deleted the winsock files... anything else?

EDITING: I uninstalled the ethernet, and then it detected it and reinstalled it.. I noticed that winsock2 appeared again... but still no connection whatsoever...