Stumped!
Well, I just finished up an hour and a half of troubleshooting on a co-workers PC, and for the first time in quite a while, I had to throw my hat in.
Granted, the fact that I was working through VNC over a modem made it really slow, and there were probably a bunch more things I could have tried given time and a responsive computer, but this thing just wouldn't cooperate. It sucks even more because I put the computer together for her just a few weeks ago. Grr...
So here's the problem... She's got Earthlink, which has it's own email program and net access interface embedded in it now, like the evil of all evils, AOL. Something in this things auto-update must've gone haywire, because now all her email programs won't check mail properly. I went so far as to even log in to the POP and SMTP servers by hand, and I could connect to them, so I have no idea what was causing the errors. Eventually I got a TCP/IP complaint from the machine, but that was about it.
I got in touch with earthlink tech support, and they gave me some voodoo command to type in: c:\netsh int reset c:\resetlog.txt Which was supposed to restore TCP/IP since you can't uninstall in on XP. What a load. I also couldn't uninstall it myself since I was dialed in over VNC, and knocking out TCP/IP would have meant dropping my connection to the machine.
When I finally gave up, I just told her I'd think about it, and that she should look into Roadrunner. What bunk. I feel like a loser.
