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notes:
my ethernet adapter is an onborad one on my abit av8
my pc connects the the internet(broadband) through a firewall(smoothwall)
im using win xp pro sp2
i have norton av up to date
before this happened i was on the internet for an hour or two, played some counter strike source, checked my email, then i shutdown. i didnt insatll any new devices or any programs for over a week as far as i can remember so i dont know how this problem started
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when i started windows yesterday it loaded up as normal, but when i tried to go on the net nothing happened. so after about 2 hors of messing with cables checking my firewall etc i eventually went into device manager and saw there were 3 or 4
<!> listed and my ethernet port was one of them, so i uninstalled all of them(cant remember for sure but i think they were the human interface thing, a parallel port...).
when i rebooted all of them were fixed except for my ethernet connection.
i tried doing this a few times yet it still failed to load, looking at it in the case i can see the lights flashing yellow and the green light is on so i know there is power going to it. i tried disabling it in the bios and then reenabling it and reinstalling it, i event removed the driver from the system and reinstalled an old 1 which came with it when i got it, but it still didnt work
next i took out one of the nics in my smoothwall(which i know works) and put it into my pc but windows installs it properly and says you have to reboot but when i do the same thing again, it shows up in the device manager with a <!>.
1 thing i noticed is that it(both of them) showed up under unknown devices instead of network adapters...
i have a good few years of computer experience, but i dont know how to solve this one
the only thing i can think of is reinstalling winxp but that is a last resort which i dont want to do.
thanks for the help, and sorry about long post, i just wanted to get everything in!