Quake3World

My girlfriend's laptop was clogged full of spyware, viruses and other bloatware crap, it was running slow as a dog, so I reformatted it with XP Pro SP2. I've given it back to her, and apparently the internet is really choppy on it, lots of sites wont load, no secure HTTP sites will load, and her connection gets dropped out quite often, and none of this happened before.

The laptop connects via 802.11b wireless, via a D-Link PCMCIA card, to a D-Link wireless router with a DSL modem in it. Her ISP is AOL, which I'm fairly sure has something to do with the problem, but the other PCs in her house (which also connect via wireless) run XP SP1 and load the sites no problem.
I've done some research and found that an innacurate MTU could be to blame, but other than that, I'm fairly stumped.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing the problems?
If the worst comes to the worst I'll put XP with no service pack on there, but I'm not hugely comfortable with that, looking at the huge number of exploits it has...

Thanks, and thanks again

ilumos

Edit: Also, MSN Messenger doesnt want to connect, no matter what I try. I can only get her on MSN via Trillian, which is far from perfect.

Do these problems (e.g. HTTPS sites not loading) occur in FF also, or only in IE?

both FF and IE.

What's the MTU and what output does "ping -n 10 -l x http://www.google.com" produce? x is the MTU minus 20 bytes.

I've only seen this happen on a win98 install (https not working, hotmail inaccesible, etc.). Never found out what the problem was...