Network Connection Wizard crashes

[Silmarillion]

I am running W2K Pro on a Dell laptop. When I run the Network Connection Wizard (Make New Connection), I get a "Program Error" - explorer.exe crashes. The desktop goes blank for a couple of seconds, I lose some of the icons out of my system tray, then the desktop comes back. The Application log comes up with a Dr. Watson error in explorer.exe (internalRenameLocationW), and a Winlogon error saying "The shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted". I have removed all the network components (including the NIC but not the modems, and Novell Client 32 V4.81 PT1). If I boot up in safe mode with network support, it doesn't crash. I have run SFC and it didn't help. The machine had a couple of viruses which I have removed, but I don't know for sure if they were the cause. Any suggestions? I am not enough of a guru on W2K to know which services / processes I can kill to try to determine if it is something that is running that is affecting it. Does anyone know the associated file(s) that go with that - I could copy from another PC.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Silmarillion]

Seeing as no-one has bothered to post a response, I will post my own. Hopefully this helps someone.

After a few days work on this problem, I wound up on the phone with MS Tech Support. I have had no previous experience with them, but the tech I spoke to was very helpful. It took about 3.5 hours on the phone to resolve the problem, and he was very patient.

We finally resolved the problem by changing and deleting some entries in the registry under "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Telephony". The tech got me to change several key values, and I also found and deleted a corrupt "Location" key (which I suspect was the cause of the problem). We are running GroupWise 5.2 with Remote, and that may have been where the problem originated, as it seems to generate bogus Location keys during setup of the connection. The user had also had a couple of viruses, which I thought initially were the cause, but which now seems unlikely.