Why clue why you had to do all that crap?
Haha, apparently it's a lot easier on SP2:
C:\> netsh winsock reset catalog
But I don't have SP2 for obvious reasons, so I had to manually re-add TCP/IP.
There was actually a very strange problem on the w98 machines at my school that was fixed by this solution as well (it was a login issue).
But I think the answer you're looking for is closer to something like: BECAUSE IT'S WINDOWS!
Well, I was more wondering what happened that made you have to go through that work. Like, what could have changed to cause that?
I'm not trying to say that Windows sucks (I don't have to), I'm just wondeirng what caused this particular problem