Microsoft Windows Troubleshooting Guide
- Introduction
- Malware Removal
- Fixing Networking Problems
- Repairing a System that Won't Boot
- Optimizing Windows
Resetting the Windows Networking Stack
With the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and any later Windows releases, Microsoft offers the ability to reset various parts of it's network stack. Specifically it allows you to reset the Winsock and the entire TCP Network Stack. This was added since many 3rd Party Vendors add various "features" to these Windows components and sometimes they "Step on each other".
Repairing the Network Connection
The first step you should take to repair the Network Stack is to simply do a "Repair" under the Network Adapter Status. To do this, simply double click on the Network Adapter under the Network Connections control Panel Applet, then under the support tab, click on the "Repair" button.
Repairing the Network
The repair button will pretty much do everything to fix your network connection, except reset the Winsock or the IP Stack. It will clear out the ARP and NetBIOS cache, flush the DNS and renew the IP.
Resetting the Winsock
One of the most problematic parts of the Windows Networking stack is the Winsock. The Winsock is a sockets API that a programmer can write a software program to use for networking functionality. The problem with this is that a 3rd party application that is untested can cause problems with Winsock. This is especially true with Malware, which is known to cause Winsock issues.
With Windows XP Service Pack 2 and later, you can "reset" Winsock to a workable state. You do this by running the following command:
netsh winsock reset catalog
The command will reset the winsock and ask you to restart the computer, the restart isn't 100% necessary, but you should probably do it anyways.
If you happen to have extremely weird problems with any networking application, I highly recommend to reset the Winsock to see if the problem disappears. I have witness very strange problems be fixed by resetting the Winsock.
Resetting the Entire Network Stack
As a last resort, Microsoft also gives you the ability to reset the entire TCP networking stack to a working state. Similar to resetting the winsock, you run the following command:
netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
Where C:\resetlog.txt is a log file that you can view to ensure the stack was reset properly.
