This XP PC was very confused.

It seems it had run out of disk space while updating to SP3.

I managed to free up some space, but the wifi connection was acting weird:

The XP wireless would say that it was connected normally, but an ipconfig /all from a CMD prompt would return with:

ipconfig: an internal error occurred: the request is not supported

OK, maybe the IP stack is corrupted (its a common problem), so I try:

netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

Now, an ipconfig returns with:

mswsock.dll not found

I copy mswsock.dll from another system, but then ipconfig complains about:

ifmon.dll cannot be loaded.

At this point, I try LSPfix, but that doesn’t help.

Next, I try to delete the registry entries:

HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServices and remove winsock and winsock2

But the network still doesn’t work.

At one point, I was getting:

wuauserv.dll was loaded, but the dllregisterserver entry point was not found.

I couldn’t do sfc /scannow (customer didn’t have the original windoze XP CD)

At this stage all I could do is a repair install of windows (which finally did fix the problem).