Hey, got a very weird problem...at least i think it is because I cant FIND a similar problem anywhere else. It all started a couple of days ago. My wife needed to sync a new iphone with itunes but had to update itunes first, but she couldnt get on the internet. I wasnt home to troubleshoot so she went to starbucks and downloaded the latest version. She came back home and was on the phone for 2hrs with the local cable company troubleshooting and the tech guy finally determined that there was something (software) on her laptop not allowing her to connect to the internet, the usual easy response i thought. I TRIED the next day to connect, couldnt...so I reset the cable modem and it worked! I synced her phone up for her and left the computer on...came back a couple hrs later and nothing worked; internet, task manager...nothing i tried. I switched users to another profile and the internet did work. I downloaded spyware blaster, windows malicious removal tool, panda cloud 2010 (her antivirus had expired), and malwarebytes. After many many hrs of scans I wasnt even able to get on with any profile on the laptop. Did more scans, cleaned some more, reset my router to default, renamed and secured and was able to get on with secondary profile, but still no dice with my wife's. She showed connected to the local network but it had the limited or no connectivity (yellow triangle with exclamation point). Tried to REPAIR; got error msg could not assign ip address. Ran the winsock xp tool and still dice. Went to administrative tools to check tcp/netbios was on and it was however dhcp server was not started, so i started it and immediately the ip address was assigned, so i figured it was fixed. Nope. Dell Wireless WLAN utility and the windows xp icon on the taskbar are all clear and indicate an excellent connection, but my wife's profile will not access the internet while the one im on right now typing this one up does...I'm at a loss at this point.

Dell Inspiron E1505
Intel CPU
T2050 @1.6GHz
1 GB Ram
XP MEDIA Center Edition Version 2002 SP3

Any help would be awesome! I'm all out of options at this point and need a stiff drink Short of getting all the documents off her profile and setting her up with a new one (probably the smartest and easiest thing to do but that would be admitting defeat!!) I don't know what else to do. Sorry if this a longwinded post, but i'm just triying to be thorough. Please let me know what other info you might need.

Thanks!!
sometimes a profile will become corrupt for whatever reason and although it MAY be possible to fix it, you will still end up cutting your losses and migrating the data and settings over to a new profile...5 hours later. My advice would be to just create a new profile and move on. Don't be too eager to delete the old one though in case she finds something not setup quite right and you need to go back in there to cross check something.Here is the process I take to restore from a corrupted user profile:

Firstly, copy all files (EXCEPT the below) from the profile location (%SystemRoot%\Documents and Settings\) to a seperate temporary folder.

NTUser.dat
NTUser.dat.log
NTUser.ini

Then, delete the 3 above files and have the user log on and off. Then replace the required files from the temporary folder.

The user can then log on and the profile should be restored.