This happened to my wife's computer and I managed to get it fixed, but it was all very strange and I am curious as to what might be going on. Here's the story:
The power at our house went off for a few hours and when it came back on she said she couldn't "get on the internet."
I restarted the computer and noticed that it was recognizing new hardware, which happened to be the network card. XP Home was unable to find drivers for the card, which was suspicious. It's a fairly new Linksys card. I dug out the CD that came with the card and it refused to install the driver, saying it was not compatible.
After awhile, I decided to physically remove the network card and the modem card from the computer and switch them around. . When I did this, it installed the modem driver properly and also installed a driver for the network card. During the "found new hardware" routine for the network card it was saying that the card was something other than a Linksys card, some name that was unfamiliar to me. It started with an "A" is all I remember. Anyway, after the installation, the card worked fine but I was disturbed by the fact that the computer was confused as to the card manufacturer. I tried to make it install the Linksys driver and, of course, it refused to do so.
I then switched the cards back to their original positions and started it up again. This time it did not go through the "found new hardware" wizard, but I was surprised to find that the card seemed to be working anyway. I looked in Device Manager and discovered that the original and correct Linksys network card was installed as it should have been originally.
I'm glad it's fixed but it is still a mystery to me why this happed the way it did.
Any comments on this?
Thanks,
Morgan
