Well gang, after pissing around with my computer most of the weekend, I still came up blank. I pulled the NIC, uninstalled TCP/IP rebooted. I reinstalled the NIC(differant slot) rebooted, no luck. I removed the old NIC again, removed TCP/IP again, and installed a new NIC (3com) and rebooted, the computer found the new hardware and installed it with the current drivers. Went in to do an ipconfig and got the "An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket ." At this point I resigned myself to the fact that the IP stack was totally screwed because it would not bind to the NIC. The only thing to do now, reinstall Windows. Now I had a secondary disk with WIN 2K on it so I installed it and started the rebuild (installing patches, firewall upgrade Anti-virus upgrade...etc). After about 4 1/2 hours, I am just about rebuilt, and I get a call from a friend who points me to This.
In short, after all that pissing around, it turns out to be some stupid registry entries are corrupted. Now I did do a search at Microsoft for this problem, but I must have been searching the wrong keywords.

Anyhow, I am back up and surfing.

Thanks to everyone here that offered suggestions and help. I hope the discussion in this thread may help someone in the future.

Cheers: