Ipconfig fails in XP

[TheWickerMan]

Hmmm........
The fact that it works in safe mode with networking makes me think that there's some program that's causing it to not run properly. Microsoft has a nice utility called autoruns (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb963902.aspx) that lets you view all the things that startup when windows starts. You may want to go through all of those and start filing them down and see if you can find the culprit.