pctlsp.dll

[Tom Barrister]

Hello. If this is in the wrong forum, please move it to wherever it's supposed to go.

I have a Dell Latitude CPX, running Windows 2000 SP4.

The file pctlsp.dll is installed by your PC Tools Antivirus (free version) in the directory C:\Program Files\Common File\PC Tools\LSP .

On my laptop (although I didn't know what was causing it at the time), this file stopped me from connecting to the internet the day after the program was installed. After the usual attempts to fix the issue, I finally ran HijackThis, which listed several (at least 10) entries to the file pctlsp.dll. HijackThis couldn't fix it, as it was a Winsock LSP, and I didn't have the LSP fixing program needed, and I couldn't download it, as I am out of town on business and didn't have access to another computer.

The antivirus program itself failed to start after that (a subsequent check by another antivirus program detected no virus/trojan/etc., and checks by Adware and SpybotS&D also turned up nothing of interest), and uninstalling it did not remove pctlsp.dll, but left this in the HijackThis log:

O10 - Broken Internet access because of LSP provider 'c:\program files\common files\pc tools\lsp\pctlsp.dll' missing

Attempting to create a dummy file in the same location gave me a services.exe error every time I attempted to use the Internet.

I finally went into my Temporary Internet Files folder and found and ran the installation program for PC Tools Antivirus again. This didn't fix the internet problem: I still couldn't connect. However, uninstalling the program again removed the pctlsp.dll (by unassociating it from services.exe, I suppose---I'm not a computer tech), and I could connect to the internet again.

I'm not sure why this is happening, and I'm posting it here as a courtesy to tech support and other users who might be having the same problem.

[Inf0Byt3]

Hi Tom, I'm a developer and I stumbled upon the exactly same bug. I have contacted support 3 times and the only answer i got back was that this dll cannot block internet acces. The strange thisng is that i had to reformat my hard-disk losing a great deal of time to get rid of it . My query was about TVAnts, a free internet TV program that also fails to connect to the net because of this DLL. AFAIK this DLL is used for the Internet Guard, but it uses injection in the active processes, so even if u stop the guard service, this won't help.

When this will be fixed, this will be THE BEST antivirus around!

[AChen]

Hi All,

This issue has been escalated to the PCTAV developers and will be resolved with the next version of PCTAV.

[Inf0Byt3]

Hello! This is really great news . Thanks!