not sure where to put this as so much has gone wrong 'over night'
running xp home sp2, avast antivirus, windoz firewall

all ok last night

avast (on auto update) when rebooted can not start 5 of the protection services (NNAMP POP3 STMP) protection

m$ firewall will not start try and manually start it get error

'..because the associated service is not running. Do you want to start the W$ firewall/ics service'

network (this gets weird)

if i ping an local ip 192.168.2.2 the laptop beeps?!! and then says pinging 'oy' with 32 bytes of data. what is the beep and what is oy all about (usually ip address)

i can not ping www.google.com but can ping it's unresolved ip 64.233.183.147??

finally using wireshark (ethereal) there are 2 unknown mac addresses on the laptop compal_8e:f0:21 and intelcor_45:73:9a and these are doing so weird sh1t like 'gratuitous arp'??

my other computers are ok (at the mo!!)

oh i have tried to reset winsocks but there is a dll file missing ifmon.dll.......

any thoughts

like to fix rather than reinstall!

cheers

psaux

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