How Do I reinstall IE

I beleive a friend of mine has an issue with IE. He had an issue with connectivity to the internet and what i found was his NIC card was only showing up as Ethernet Controller. He didn't have the driver CD, so I removed it from the PCI slot and installed it in anotherone. After I rebooted the driver was installed automatically. (is this because the driver was previously installed and is located in a driver folder?) He had connectivity for a week and has now lost it again. I checked the cabling and it looked fine. I did see the IE error report come up a couple of times, so do you guys think it can be an issue with IE. He does have a lot of crap on his PC. Let me know what you think and how to reinstall IE

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Comments

stlsmoore

I think you can reinstall IE by going to Add/Remove programs you may need the XP CD. But I don't remember to much as I have never really did before.

royal

No, you can't by going to add/remove programs. By doing a simple search on Google for, "reinstall IE" I found the following:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318378

iowatech

The step with the NIC was the correct thing to do, the re-installation of the drivers automatically was using the cached driver as you thought.

If it has a ton of stuff on it as you say it probably has spy,ad,mal-ware all over it. Run a decent cleaner program (CCleaner) works well, run his anti-virus program if he doesn't have one go download the freeware AVG program and scan his system. There are plenty more programs out there but those two will get you started at least.

Have fun,

(A simple IE re-installation article can be found here:)

http://www.petri.co.il/reinstall_ie_6_on_xp.htm

sprkymrk

The last bout of MS updates caused an issue with IE crashes - an update 2 weeks later supposedly fixed it.

Sorry I don't have the KB articles handy. Try going to Windows Updates and check there for any missing patches.

malcybood

I've always just done a reinstall of XP Service Pack 2 if I've ever had to reinstall Outlook Express or IE6.......Usually does the trick (depending on what the issue is)

JDMurray

Does he have problems with other non-IE network software (games, Skype, IM, FireFox, etc.) on his computer or only IE? And is he using IE6 or IE7? If only problems with IE, try running the IE7 installer and allow it to install Windows Defender too.

shednik

sounds like you've got a good amount of suggestions to try...it's tough to decide what the actual issue is without having the machine in front of you...good luck

telecomops101

He doesn't have SP2, so I beleive if the LAN connection is good he should be able to connect to the Microsoft Update center by right clicking on My Computer and going to Explorer. From here I am having him type the address in the URL. Any feedback on this would be appreciated. Thanks for all your responses

seuss_ssues

you can as already mentioned "uninstall / reinstall SP2" or "rerun the IE7 install"

But it could be something else causing the issue. Can he ping anything? Do other browsers work? I see more malware and winsock problems than i have seen ie needing to be reinstalled (but it does occur)

telecomops101

He can sucessfully ping, but keeps losing the internet connection. The router and NIC card have all lights on, you can ping, but cannot connect. IPCONFIG shows no ip data. When I release / renew nothing happens, still no ip address information. The only way i was able to restore was to remove and re-install the NIC card. It lasted for about a week and now it's down again. Like I said he has XP SP1, not 2, so Im thinking he needs to upgrade to SP2 and do all the Microsoft Critical updates. As in my previous message, can he still get to the internet through the address bar in explorer?? If his LAN connection is still good I believe he should be able to...correct??? It seems to me a software issue, not hardware. I also tried the pc on a different port in the switch/router. Any help woul be appreciated. Thanks to all for replying...

networker050184

What are you pinging? You say there is no ip data but you can ping? You need an ip adress to recieve the icmp reply. If you have no ip address you will not be able to pull web pages by name or ip address. I believe you either have a NIC issue or it could be an adware/malware issue as well. Nothing really seems to point towards the IE as the problem. Have you scanned the machine yet?

sthomas

telecomops101 wrote:

He can sucessfully ping, but keeps losing the internet connection. The router and NIC card have all lights on, you can ping, but cannot connect. IPCONFIG shows no ip data. When I release / renew nothing happens, still no ip address information. The only way i was able to restore was to remove and re-install the NIC card. It lasted for about a week and now it's down again. Like I said he has XP SP1, not 2, so Im thinking he needs to upgrade to SP2 and do all the Microsoft Critical updates. As in my previous message, can he still get to the internet through the address bar in explorer?? If his LAN connection is still good I believe he should be able to...correct??? It seems to me a software issue, not hardware. I also tried the pc on a different port in the switch/router. Any help woul be appreciated. Thanks to all for replying...

I would check for spyware first if you haven't already. When I work on a PC I first get rid of all the crap software that does not need to be installed. Then I delete temp files, prefetch, etc...Running a program like ccleaner would do this automatically for you. After you do that install, update, and run Spybot Search and Destroy, Windows Defender, Adaware, and Hijack this. Also run some Anti-Virus software. At this point if you have the connection up again install all Windows updates.

If not try this command to reset the TCP/IP stack - netsh int ip reset logfile.txt

Or try the following tool - http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4372.html

If none of that works you may have a bad NIC. I did have an issue one time where I had to copy the C:\WINDOWS\System32\tcpip.sys file from the Windows CD and replace it on the computer so if all else fails you may try that as well.

JDMurray

telecomops101 wrote:

Like I said he has XP SP1, not 2, so Im thinking he needs to upgrade to SP2 and do all the Microsoft Critical updates.

I, personally, will not waste a second of my time troubleshooting a Windows XP machine that does not have SP2 and all the latest updates installed--especially if the machine is connected to the Internet and is used for email or Web browsing. It just not worth the time spent to troubleshoot a problem that should have already been patched.

sthomas

JDMurray wrote:

telecomops101 wrote:

Like I said he has XP SP1, not 2, so Im thinking he needs to upgrade to SP2 and do all the Microsoft Critical updates.

I, personally, will not waste a second of my time troubleshooting a Windows XP machine that does not have SP2 and all the latest updates installed--especially if the machine is connected to the Internet and is used for email or Web browsing. It just not worth the time spent to troubleshoot a problem that should have already been patched.

I agree with that, but if the machine is infected with spyware it may be running so slow that it may be difficult or next to impossible to get the Service Pack installed. That is why I recommend getting the machine at least somewhat working first before you install updates.

seuss_ssues

Pretty much every computer has some malware on it.
Pretty much anything with sp1 has every malware on it

You can download a single executable for sp2, burn it to disc and then install on the machine. OR you can try the new SP3, there is a release candidate out.

JDMurray

sthomas wrote:

I agree with that, but if the machine is infected with spyware it may be running so slow that it may be difficult or next to impossible to get the Service Pack installed.

In that case, I would remove the hard drive, make it a slave drive in another computer, and clean it with every free A/V and A/S program out there. If the computer still performs poorly it's not because of Malware.

telecomops101

Well heres the latest update on what i did to the PC:

I had him backup all of his information and then I reformatted the Hard drive and reinstalled XP. He was finally able to get Avast to run and it did pick up a Trojan virus.

The only issue is still I cannot install SP2.

Prior to me reformatting, I installed SP2 and the PC would not boot, it got stuck at the Advanced screen and you couldn't even get into safe mode, it would just continue to cycle every time you tried to start normally. The system is a 7 year old Gateway, so from of the Knowledge Base articles it said he possibly could have an outdated BIOS, ot a type of Pentium 4 processor with a certain stepping. (not to sure what that meant) When I checked the BIOS iit did state he had a Pentium 4 processor. So I just went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled XP.

The PC is running great know, but I still cannot install SP@, it does the same as I stated above even after the reformatting, so he is still running SP1 XP Home. I did install CCleaner, Adaware and Avast. I also updated his system with all the critical security updates.

One other issue I still noticed is why on Certain webpages (one especially, his kids use WebKinz) I always get the IE error report, (Send Report or Don't Send) when I first open it up. Why is this.

Thanks again for all the responses......Happy New Year to all

telecomops101

Just to make my above statement clear, the Trojan virus was found before I reformatted.

JDMurray

When you say that "you can't install SP2," what are the error messages that you are receiving? If SP2 won't install on a clean installation of Windows XP, it's likely there are hardware incompatibility issues between SP2 and that very old Gateway machine. It might be a simple fix of updating to the last release of the BIOS, or upgrading an old card or peripheral. Also, Google to see if anyone else had problems installing SP2 on that model of Gateway.

In any case, if you put a pre-SP2 Windows XP computer on the Internet and use it for Web or email, it will get owned pretty quickly, even behind a firewall.