Question : Windows XP Winsock missing after Office 2000 installation.

I have a computer with WinXP that had a working dial up networking connection until after I
installed Office 2000. During the installation, a question came up asking about installing
Outlook 2000 over another version of Outlook, but I can't remember the question.  I think that
the question was in regard to uninstalling the current Outlook (Outlook Express in XP) first.

After this, dial up networking connects fine, but no application can browse the net, and no
ping works to it.  Ping to the 127.0.0.1 does work ok.  One troubleshooting guide I saw told
me to look for the winsock files.  When I do a find for the specific files, the dlls, none are found.

What I want to know is this: If I copy the files from a CD or floppy to the system directory,
and then register them, will this fix the problem?  I was thinking that I read somewhere that
WinXP doesn't use the same windows sockets methods to communicate.  Any help here will
be great.  Thanks in advance.

Answer : Windows XP Winsock missing after Office 2000 installation.

I wouldn't think Office would be able to cause this type of issue, but you never know.

Here's what I would do:

Uninstall Office.

Run system restore back to before you installed Office.  See if things are working and if you can ping and browse.

If all is working, then go to start, run, and type:  msconfig    hit ok

then click on the services tab and put a check in "Hide all Microsoft services" and then in the window above, uncheck what's left.  

then click on the startup tab and uncheck everything.

click apply, close, restart.

once rebooted, reinstall Office.

then test to make sure all is ok.  If it is, then go back into msconfig and on the general tab, put the dot back in Normal Startup.  Click apply, close, restart.  Verify it's still working.

What this will do is stop all (well, most) 3rd party services from running in the background during the install, incase it's one of them that's causing the issue.

Hope this helps.

Mark