There are several reasons for these network issues including computer crashes, installation of networking software or malicious software attacks that tampered with network settings and Winsock. A corrupt Winsock can therefor lead to all kinds of networking troubles which are difficulty to analyze and understand for the inexperienced user.

Some software developers on the other hand have created software programs that can fix most Winsock errors with the push of a button. That’s obviously more comfortable than having to fix the errors manually.

Winsock Repair is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that has two primary functions. The first is to reset the TCP/IP stack which will rewrite important Windows Registry keys with their default values. The second will try to repair Winsock so that the network connectivity issues are a thing of the past. It does provide an option to list the installed LSPs (Layered Service Providers) which can be important as pre-installed LSPs might need to be reinstalled after fixing the Winsock errors.

LSP Fix is an alternative to Winsock Repair. It makes it easier to deal with LSP related problems as it will list all of them in its interface with the option to remove only selected ones from the computer system.

It is however not possible to fix the item directly in HijackThis. A portable software program called LSP-Fix comes to the rescue. It has been primarily designed to fix Winsock errors.

The program is interesting in this case as it can be used to remove the nwprovau.dll dynamic link library from the computer system. The box “I know what I’m doing” has to be checked before that option becomes available. The program lists the currently installed dll files in the left column, nwprovau.dll should be one of them. All that needs to be done is to select this dll and click on the arrow that is pointing to the right to move it to the Remove column. Keep in mind that this will remove the dll permanently from the computer system (creating a backup before proceeding might be a good idea)

A click on the Finish button will complete the process and remove all files that are listed in the Remove column from the computer system.

Internet Maniac combines a set of networking tools in its interface. The portable software provides access to functions like traceroutes, pings, host lookups, whois information, lookup IPs or domain names and more. Every option is directly accessible from the main interface.

A click on an option will usually display a second window that can be used to enter data, say a domain name for Whois. The same window will also display the results of the function directly in its window.

The tool is completely portable and requires less than 5 Megabytes of computer memory. The homepage of the developer has been deleted a long time ago. You can download the latest available version of Internet Maniac right here at Ghacks (internet maniac).