I actually have 2 problems, but i'll start with what i put in my subject. ok, i recently got a new harddrive as my old when went to crap. after installing windows i did the appropriate updates including windows sp2. now, whenever i try to use internet explorer it comes up with "cannot find server". i use aol instant messenger and it is always on, so my connection to the internet works. i tried to install firefox to see if it was jsut internet explorer and that worked for about 10 minutes, and now it jsut loads a blank page and says done at the bottom. i've tried a lot of different things including running some winsockfix program, renaming the wsock32.dll file to wsock32.old. i did it a couple of different times and that actually made it possible to load a page and then it started doing the same thing over again so i figure i might be on to something with that.
problem number 2: when i try to shut down windows it gets to the point where it says windows is shutting down and it stays there. i wanted to see if it just took a long time so i kept it like that overnight and it was still the same screen in the morning.
please help. i'm just a poor college student trying to fix this on my own without the aid of professionals. thanks all.