Ok, first up I'm gonna pay £10 to the first person if someone can solve this problem, because I take it very personally when I can't fix something with computers and I want to know if its possible.
Especially as this isn't rocket science.

The problem is relatively simple to understand and I have fixed it countless times before, but this time it won't work and my ego wants to know for sure if its possible to fix realistically.

OS=Vista Home Premium. Semi modern Acer laptop.

Problem, I can only get local connectivity on wireless wifi, now before some of the slightly informed start talking about delete cookies, checking DHCP, unchecking IPV6, Winsocket fixes, I have done all this ok and quite a bit more.

I have tried it on several different modems and routers and its the same thing. It will only connect locally and its sometimes says limited or no connectivity.

The ip address is starting with 169, which ok is one that's set to stop any conflicts it it can't see DHCP, but even when I do it manually I can't make the connection.

Here is the interesting part.

The night before, the guy installed norton (i know) and the install went wrong. When he tried to uninstall it said it cannot find the path. Even when I downloaded Nortons own uninstaller utility it would not get rid of it.

So I'm thinking/hoping that norton has royally fucked something up (like the stack/registry) to the point where the only real way to fix it is to reformat.

Amazingly I have not tried to reinstall norton and then uninstall because I can't get hold of the guy till next week and I never thought I would be so baffled to ask for help.

So before I give up and put it down to an impossbile fix does anyone else want to get one over me and earn a whopping 10 pounds by suggesting how I can solve this problem without taking the easy way out?

I have done system restores.
I have unsintalled drivers, and as I said earlier quite a lot more.

What is even crazier is even when I tried different wireless network cards the thing STILL won't work and posts the same problem.

Oh, I have also taken it to two IT friends to look at, which was funny as they usually come to me, but desperate times call for desperate measures. They failed, despite holding down well paid I.T. jobs.

Oh and even the fucking vista repair thingy didn't work!

my only option at the moment is to get the norton disk and try to reinstall and hope it I can then unisntall it then, and undo what damage it might have done.

That's my last option because apart from that I'm all out.

If anyone on the tubes has a wortwhile suggestion and does not find writing it down I'll gladly try it!

I done all the DNSflushing etc, I'm all out!
if its not solved here in public its gonna be filed under "realistically impossible to fix".

I have tow more things left to try.

Search for virus.
Reinstall Norton and then uninstall.

If no answers then I'm nuking it.

*****UPDATE*****
It gets better. I got the norton 360 installer off the net to try and reinstall. When I try it says I need to uninstall the previous version first, which of course is proving impossible to uninstall.
Even 3rd party after market uninstall programs won't install.

So I'm not clutching straws with...
Virus on the PC.
Impossible to fix unless I get the guy who wrote Vista to come to my house. I can live with such a defeat!