Cannot renew ip address xp...

Quite nasty a problem, happened to WinXP time to time. Last time, the VNC client stopped responding with a "socket error". Then everything went down, one after the other. Geez virus, or something similar animal... The always-cure reboot finalized the problem. XP said that the network card had limited connectivity, and tried to renew the IP address when I clicked on repair (had also tried ipconfig /release & renew without results) and it just told me it was unable to renew the IP address (which begun with 169.***.***.***).

The forums and groups did not give any usable tips, then finally I found this article: How to determine and recover from Winsock2 corruption.

The article is from Microsoft. I applied the suggested brutal-looking solution of typing netsh winsock reset at the command prompt. The article suggested that some of the winsock-sensitive apps would require a reinstall, but it looked a good compromise to reinstalling the whole Windows (having been customized for more than a year.)

After the reboot, it came back. Some of the applications looked dizzy a bit, but they recovered finally. Now I am happy again. Ah yes... the root of the problem must have been winsock2 corruption :)