OK. I finally put together some time to try to deal with this. I tried following your instructions about manually removing things from my registry. This did not clear the problem. I did, however, have a computer with no drivers for my network card. There were a few minutes of very stressful worry involved there until I finally figured out exactly how to get Windows to install a NIC driver that it must have installed when I installed Windows 7. I did install Windows 7 Pro on this computer myself a few months ago. Something got automatically installed that made the network connection work. So I hunted around for what looked promising. Part of my hunt was to boot my W7 install disk from my removable CD/DVD drive. Fortunately, I was not able to find anything that worked. I say fortunately because I feel I was on the verge of destroying my system completely, necessitating another complete install from the ground up, a prospect I distinctly did not relish. So then I thought maybe I can just go into the Device Manager & install something from there. I did finally settle upon (after a couple of attempts to do things that led to dead ends) searching my computer manually for drivers to install. There was an extremely lengthy list of choices under the Intel heading. I finally settled upon something that had the string I210 in its name. That seemed close to the device name I happened to have mentioned in the E-mail I got as a result of being subscribed to this list, and which was squirreled away in my E-mail client, which is a good thing because I had essentially no network connection due to my having totally removed the NIC driver that had been on this system. So I picked this one driver & it seemed to install. More than seemed to. Clearly, since I am here posting this comment, I did manage to install something that works. According to Device Manager, I have this:
I now have a working network connection once again. I don't think I will be attempting to update this driver again. This experience was entirely too painful & stressful. I have no desire to repeat it. This connection works, and works well. Firefox connects to the Internet, evidence being this post. My E-mail works. Spotify works. My ISP tells me my network connection performance at the present moment is this:
Download Speed: 4.38 Mbps (547.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 0.67 Mbps (83.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 14 ms
Jitter: 1 ms
9/10/2016, 2:44:32 PM
Good enough! It ain't broke! I ain't fixing it any further! But I do appreciate your paying attention to my request for help. Too bad it didn't help, but thanks anyway.