Now my wife's other XP PC is down. It caught a trojan (some internet security program) which Malwarebytes dispatched then a week later a second trojan (persistent porn site) which Malwarebytes also dispatched. After the second trojan was dispatched, a friend of hers enabled Windows updates for the first time in the PC's ~15 months of use. After updating SP2 to SP3 and IE6 to IE8 among other things, IE and Chrome will not connect to the internet even if other apps are able to connect for updates and such. IE's diagnostics say the firewall is blocking connectivity, though it makes the same claim even when the Windows firewall is disabled. Other PCs on the same network behave normally so I'm sure the problem is isolated to this PC.

I removed AVG and Malwarebytes, installed a MS SP3 patch for this symptom when SP3 was installed without disabling AV (AVG wasn't manually disabled for the SP3 update) and performed netsh winsock and IP resets. No joy after a hundred reboots.

I've tried the fixes suggested online so I'm stuck for what to do next. This is an obscure netbook for which I can't find drivers so reinstalling XP is a last resort. What can I try next?

Thanks,
Sixto
87 300D