ping *.*=server not found

Hi all. I hope someone can help with this post hack attack problem. I am running win98 w/ 56k dialup to ISP,IE6 browser. Had Tiny Personal Firewall installed and running. My son was in a chat room (opendiary) when the "installing new software" box popped up and proceeded to "install" a new modem. The system rebooted. He checked and there was no new modem. He got back online with no problem, but only recieved the DNS error page. The next day I attempted to get online, had no errors and got online into the isp and noticed the Tiny Personal Firewall was gone, IE was ver.5 and I could not open any pages. I then tried to ping yahoo & msn and several other domains, got server not found message. I did restore an earlier registry, reloaded IE 5.5 and Win98. No help.
Any suggestions or am I going to reformat and reload my HD.

Thanx in advance,
Dionarap

Thanks

try to ping by ip address instead of domain name. If IE is giving you that error, it is because it cannot resolve the IP and chances are you have a DNS issue. You can verify this by pinging the IP addy itself. If you get a reply back, you know for sure it is DNS...

check the properties of the dial up connection and see if you lost your setting for dns, etc.

i have no idea what could cause the 'new modem' thing to happen!

Do u have system restore?

Thanks all for your time and trouble:
Invictus - tried that w/same results
Tdob1 - redid dun
Preep - No - I don't, but I did restore a good registry.

This may sound crazy, but make sure you still have tcp/ip installed. It sounds like you are getting your ppp connection, but your computer doesn't know what an IP is....

does persfw.exe still show running in the task mgr?



<<sucking eggs with Debwalin ???>>

If you have TCP/IP installed, check to see if anything's in the DNS setting. There should be at least 1 IP address. Try to ping that IP address as that's your DNS server. If you don't get a response there, try pinging your gateway (that should also be there too under the Gateway tab). If THAT doesn't work, then you're not getting to the gateway to get out to the outside world. You might have to delete your modem and your TCP/IP entirely and rebuild them from scratch as I've seen corrupted TCP/IP entries that look valid but aren't.