I have had a few laptops running Vista (Enterprise version) in my care that have experienced this problem lately. The user boots up their machine and logs in, then they receive an error from the .NET Framework, which is the first symptom of this particular issue.
The user receives the following error:
Microsoft .NET Framework
Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately.
The handle is invalid.
There are also a few other symptoms that I have noticed with this issue. I was unable to open the Event Viewer on any of the affected laptops due to the fact that the Windows Event Log service was unable to start. One of the laptops was not receiving an IP address because the DHCP service was not started. In both cases manually starting the services did not work. Then, on the latest machine with this issue, the user was trying to input proxy server information into Internet Explorer but when she hit OK to save the settings nothing happened, the settings dialogue box was still open and did not apply the settings.
All of these symptoms have something to do with Winsock2 corruption in the registry and Winsock needs to be reset. Do the following to reset Winsock:
- Click
, type cmd in the Start Search box, right-click cmd.exe, click Run as administrator, and then press Continue. - Type netsh winsock reset at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
Note If the command is typed incorrectly, you will receive an error message. Type the command again. When the command is completed successfully, a confirmation appears, followed by a new command prompt. Then, go to step 3. - Type exit, and then press ENTER.
Reboot your machine.
This solution should also work for XP & 2003 as well, see KB 811259 for more information about this fix.
