Terrible Networking Day

A day for damned networking

When I first turned on my home computer screen, the Bit Torrent client I'm using to do P2P stuffs strew up, application window hung. Most windows icons turned black without properly displaying the supposed images. Treated it like another "MS did it again" day, without hesitation, I pressed the restart button.

Things start to get ugly when Windows restarted. I was unable to connect to my Wifi access point. It keeps on showing the message "Waiting for the network..." blah blah and at the end I got my self an Automatic Private Address with limited connectivity.
Shoot, someone hacked my AP and changed the network key? ? ?

NOPE, I tried the same key on my laptop and it worked perfectly.

Reverted back to the normal Power On/Off cycle on AP and the Wifi client, nothing seems improving.

I've made a wrong step by changing some values in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/NetworkCards and this causes a big hassle when I next restarted the PC. Everything's strew up. DB2 was down, DHCP client was failed to start, and other applications which are relied on the TCPIP communication protocol stacks doesn't seem to like you anymore... jesus christ. And all this happened just because a simple change of value in the registry. Hahaha. Well done, MS.

Struggled for a few minutes, I decided to repair the TCPIP stack and also Winsock.
MS Knowledge Base got few articles that illustrate the steps for doing so, but basically it involves the following:

1. Log into Safe Mode
2. Delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Winsock and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Winsock
3. Edit the nettcpip.inf file in %SYSTEM_ROOT%\inf\nettcpip.inf, locate the below lines:

[MS_TCPIP.PrimaryInstall]
"Characteristics = 0xa0"......

And change the value 0xa0 to 0x80

4. Go into command prompt window, type "netsh winsock reset"

5. You can try also this command "netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt"

6. Restart your machine

7. Go to control panel -> Network Connections -> Right click on any of the connection that has TCPIP installed and check out the connection Properties

8. Click on Install button, then select Protocol from the available list. Then click on the Have Disk button, type in the "C:\windows\inf" in the "Copy manufacturer's file from:" text box. (Assuming your Windows is located at c:\windows). Lastly click ok.

9. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) from the Network Protocol list. Click Ok.

10. When you return to the connection properties screen and this time if you select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the Uninstall button is now enabled. Click on the Uninstall button.

11. This step is particularly important. You should wait for at least 10 minutes for the process to be completed. If you terminated your system now, the stack shall get corrupted and you will need to restart the above steps again.

12. Restart the machine

13. Now reinstall the TCPIP stack by performing the above step 7 to 12.

Lastly to ensure everything ok, do the power on/off cycle on the AP and your machine.

And this works for me finally, in the early morning of next day. Indeed a bad day.