About Winsock: The Winsock is a technical specification that defines how Windows network software should access network services, especially TCP/IP. It defines a standard interface between a Windows TCP/IP client application (such as an FTP client or a Gopher client) and the underlying TCP/IP protocol stack. A Windows XP machine can sometimes have its WINSOCK catalog become corrupted and it appears like a network connection is disabled. In that case one of the symptoms is, if you use the ping command, it gives you arbitary characters in the output. example: In command prompt, type PING 127.0.0.1 you will see the reply pinging °ÿ with 32 bytes of data That °ÿ is the telltale sign that the WINSOCK catalog is corrupted. You can use the netsh command utility to repair the winsock. Please enter the following command in the command prompt: