My computer turned itself off and killed its network adapter?

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Hi, I'm having a bit of a mysterious problem here.

I'm using winXP. Last night, I started a download on kazaa thinking it would be finished by morning if not much earlier. When I checked in the morning, the computer was off. It hadn't been turned off by anyone else in my house. So I started it and went through all the normal stuff and started windows properly. I tried going to a website and it didn't work. Instant "this page cannot be displayed" message. When I went to network connections in the control panel, it took about 2 minutes to display because it was probably trying to look for the connection but couldn't find it. The IP was not the usual "192.168.0.2" but it was some strange one that said "automatic private address" below it which I've never seen before, not my external IP either. When I looked on my router it didn't show an active connection to the computer, the lights are off. The other computer on the same router DOES have an active connection though, and works fine so it isn't the router's fault. It isn't the cable either because I switched them around to test. When I connect the dead computer directly to the cable modem instead of through the router, it still doesn't work. The cable modem doesn't give a green light showing that it's connected to something.

On the dead computer, the LAN card is enabled in the bios (it's integrated) and windows recognizes it and shows that it's enabled and working. Uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling doesn't help. I can't ping anything, not the router or the other computer.

So what could be wrong? Seems to me like the card is disabled, but that's not possible since windows detects it.

 

[BarryAZ]

Did you reset the IP address including Subnet and Gateway to the what it should be?

It *sort* of sounds like you might have gotten 'hacked' from the outside here.

 

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Do you reset it by typing "ipconfig /release" then "/renew" in the command line? I tried that but it just froze there for a long time, then said that it reached an error or something like that.

EDIT: doesn't the router actually act as a firewall?

 

[clicknext]

BUMP, a little more information that may be helpful: I reformatted the computer recently, and I've barely installed anything on it. I've never updated the NIC drivers before, but I've never had need to since the ones that come with XP worked fine since I got this computer until last night. I just installed Kazaa last night, though, it's kazaalite and the installation tells you to add a bunch of addresses to the "hosts" file in windows\system32\drivers\. I've undone this change though.

And I don't think it's a softwear problem. Normally the router can detect a connection to the computer as soon as I power it on, before it even POSTs. Very confusing...

 

[clicknext]

I reset the BIOS to default settings and it works now. That makes no sense since I never changed any BIOS settings in the first place, but oh well, I'm happy as long as it works. =)