I feel your pain, dude. And it sounds suspiciously like my
own problem, on the same date, after doing the same!
I also have a Compaq (Deskpro) running Windows 2000, which
has been a "gold standard" machine for me for the last
three years, until the last set of updates (yes, I
normally don't install drivers from there, but am pretty
sure I did this time)... nothing else has been installed,
hardware or software, for at least five months.
All of a sudden, also on 12/7, I lost connectivity to my
network, although I can get an IP address. Everything
else, ping (for instance) times out. The only thing that
is different is that I now have two WAN Miniport IP with a
yellow exclamation mark and a Code 31 error message. I
cannot uninstall them, change drivers or anything, the
system won't let me telling me "it may be needed to reboot
the machine" - have you checked your device manager?
I have found very few references to anything resembling
this problem and nothing in the way of fixes, but if you
have the same problem, maybe we can work together towards
solving it?
I tried reinstalling SP4 to no avail. I am about to do a
Repair reinstall and if that does not work, I may have to
(for the first time that I know of in Win2000) have to re-
do the machine from scratch in order to fix a problem!
Good luck,
Jose B. Gonzalez