Wireless is conected, but no network access

sinshan23 said:

If you are experiencing problems with getting out to the internet, but your Networking and Sharing Center states you have Excellent signal and you are connected but it say "Limited Acess" this basically means you have no internet and their is no gateway. This happened to me after removing an application used to Manage a Wifi device such as AT&T Communication Manager. Once I restarted it blocked the connection.

Here is what WON'T work:

- Rebooting router
- Rebooting Modem
- Hard Wire Connection
- Changing Security method
- IPconfig/renew/release
- IPconfig/FlushDNS
- Turning off Firewalls
- Static IP
- Changing wireless profilee settings

Here is what WILL work and worked for me, follow these steps:

Start
Accessories
Scroll to the "Command Prompt"
Highlight "Command Prompt"
Hold Shift and Right-click on "Command Prompt"
Choose "Run as Administrator"
You are now in the System32
Run this command: netsh winsock reset
It will prompt you to reboot your pc.
Reboot and try to reconnect to your preferred wireless.

Somone who tries this, please post with a Result

I found this thread through Google and thought I should add my anecdotes regarding AT&T Communication Manager. Hopefully this will help other people identify issues related to it.

I work for a small cable ISP and have encountered at least two other cases of Windows getting broken/botched after uninstalling AT&T Communication Manager.

Yesterday, I spoke with a new customer. His previous provider was AT&T, and the AT&T Communication Manager software had been installed on his computer. Though his connection was working fine, the AT&T Communication Manager was nagging him constantly, so he decided to uninstall it. After removing it, he could no longer get DHCP on the wireless connection and didn't have any way to test the direct-wired connection. He couldn't even get DHCP when connecting to an unsecured wireless network. We performed a System Restore to a point before the AT&T software had been uninstalled. Clearly, System Restore failed to fully restore the AT&T software because we got an error message on boot indicating that Windows couldn't find something in Program Files and the path\filename referenced AT&T Communication Manager. So it restored the startup entry in the registry, but it didn't restore everything to %programfiles%.

Side-note: If System Restore can't properly keep track of %programfiles% contents, then what good is System Restore? Every time I've *ever* needed System Restore to work in a situation like this, it consistently fails. I'm not exaggerating.

The previous case was a customer with a Toshiba laptop that couldn't get online after removing the AT&T software. The AT&T software had originally bundled some kind of McAfee security software and there were indicators that it wasn't fully removed. If I recall correctly, DHCP still worked but all protocols (HTTP, FTP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, etc) were blocked...except ICMP ping. I could ping out just fine. The customer blamed us because she said it had worked with her previous provider (many months earlier). She got some free computer work out of it. Of course, System Restore didn't work. I had to back up the customer's files (just a few pictures) and perform a factory restore. The factory restore took an entire day because Toshiba's restore process is full of FAIL. Even after the restore was complete, the hard drive turned out to have a bad sector which would cause Windows to freeze shortly after reaching the desktop on each boot.

1) This is a problem with bloatware, botching systems by not removing itself properly.

2) It's also a problem with Microsoft Windows, allowing itself to be botched in ways that aren't easily-reversible with System Restore.

[edit]
Oh, and thanks for the winsock reset info. It worked this time. The previous time this happened, the system botched itself too badly after failing System Restore.