Can't Access Internet (Can ping IP's)

Hi Folks,

I've been pulling my hair out over this one for the past
few days. I'll try to detail as much as possible - I want
to fix this!
We have a small home network that consists of:

3Com cable modem
Linksys 4 port Cable/DSL router
WinXP machine w/Realtek PCI NIC
Win98 machine (AMD K6 450 w/448M RAM) w/3Com PCI NIC
***Win98 has one hard drive partitioned as two (I think!)-
there's a C drive at 2GIG and a D drive at 4GIG***

The WinXP machine is fine (other than randomly asking for
a dial up connection every now and again).
The Win98 machine cannot access the internet anymore.
This network has functioned without any problems for the
past twelve months. The troubles started when I noticed
there was a 'Bargain Buddy' program running on this PC and
slowing everything to a crawl. I tried removing it, but
it would make it so I couldn't open Outlook Express - I
thought this was very strange. I downloaded 'Ad-aware 6'
and cleaned up the C drive. Removed all these types of
programs. Now everything worked fine. The program did
say that it couldn't remove one file at this time for some
reason and said that it would scan and remove it on start
up (I don't know what the file/program was). I restarted
the PC and Ad-aware started and began going through the
whole scanning process again. After several minutes I hit
the 'Abort' button and Ad-aware said 'Scan Complete - no
problems, etc'.
This is where I lost access to the internet. I still have
access to the shared file on the WinXP machine and vice
versa. From the Win98 I can ping the WinXP by name and
IP. I can ping the router IP, the local host, and even
Yahoo!'s IP - however, I can't ping any URL's. Here's
what I've done so far to try and pinpoint the problem:

Removed NIC and reinstalled
Removed/added TCP/IP
*Tried reconfiguring Win98 for the network (didn't work -
see below)
Updated winsock.dll and wsock32.dll from the Win98 disk(I
did this by extracting from the disk, unzipped, saved to a
folder in my D drive, then used SFC to extract/replace the
files in C:\windows and C:\windows/system respectively -
then deleted the files in the folder on my D drive)
I also plugged the Win98 directly into the cable modem to
see if I could access the internet, but I still couldn't-
not sure if this is even possible if the PC is set up for
the router.

* When I tried to reconfigure the Win98 for the network,
the helper disk goes along and searches for the router and
gives me an error message saying 'cannot locate router!
make sure all connections are made or reset router'. All
connections are made, but I have not reset the router
yet. I don't see how resetting the router would change
what's going on.

After all of this, I'm still getting the same problems! I
have not gone in and updated/changed the registry as I've
seen recommended on some sites. I'm not a computer guy by
any stretch - just a 'do it yourselfer' with too much time
on my hands!
Any help, suggestions, guidance on this would be greatly
appreciated!

Thank you and take care,

Matt

Hello All,

Somebody on another board was able to give me direcions on
how to fix this. I was able to fix this problem by doing
the following:

Remove all TCP/IP protocols - don't restart when it asks
you to.
Go into 'regedit' and manually removing the 'winsock'
and 'wsock32' folders. They're located in HKEY_LOCAL
MACHINE, System
Exit regedit and reboot
Go into Control Panel, Network, and add TCP/IP
Reboot when it asks - it then rebuilds the winsock files

This helped me get back up and running!

Thanks and good luck!