No Internet in Safe Mode with Networking

[boomerang]

I've got a heavily infected laptop here I'm trying to clean up. It an older Compaq Presario 1275 with no ethernet port. The owner has been using a wireless PCMCIA card but I have a wired router here.

I purchased a POS Belkin F5D5010 CardBus card with an ethernet dongle. It was cheap and on closeout which was good because it's a one time deal.

Card works fine in normal mode, but will not in Safe Mode with Networking which is where I need to be to try and clean this thing up.

It does not show up in Device Manager in Safe Mode. At install, it was set up automatically by W2K Pro. I updated the drivers thinking that would take care of it, but still no go.

I see there are two instances of the wireless card in DM in safe Mode.

The Belkin site is useless.

This belongs to a good friend of my wife's and I'd really like to get it cleaned up if I can, but I need connectivity in Safe Mode. He bought it second hand and was given no disks so a reinstall is not an option without a cash outlay. Edit: Been running with no AV software and has bad surfing habits. It's amazing how stupid people can be.

What, if anything am I overlooking?

 

[imported_Phil]

I'm not sure, but I'm going to say that you'd be better off downloading any utilities you need (HiJack This, Ad-Aware etc) on a seperate machine, copying them to a CD and running them from Safe Mode, as opposed to downloading them.

Is there anything in particular that you simply must have from the Internet to clean it up?

Personally, I install spyware removal programs, then copy the programs folder to a USB key and run them from there- no need to install, and you can update them on the source machine before running them on the destination machine.

If you're looking to update things like Ad-Aware, you can always download the definitions file manually and insert it into the program's folder.

 

[boomerang]

Thiat's more or less what I ended up doing. Thumb drive, but I hadn't thought of doing updates first.

Actually, once I successfuly got the updates for Kaspersky AV to download (the nasties were fighting it like crazy) I scanned and got enough grip on things to start running other apps.

I've convinced myself it's far better to wipe and reinstall. I've got about 18 hours in this already. Part of the problem is this thing is old and slow. Takes forever to boot and shut down. Of course nearly everything needs a reboot.

The system was still on SP2. Tons and tons of downloads. Of course I have to do a little maintenance too. That's probably 3 to 4 hours of the 18.