Hello,
I would like to report a bug or an issue I've been having with the latest version of adwcleaner 5.105. I work at a university and have been assisting with malware removal and typically part of the process, we run adwcleaner since it usually does a fantastic job at removing adware. Essentially we ran into the issue where after running adwcleaner the internet would no longer work. After some investigation your program runs a winsock reset by default. This winsock reset process was deleting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinSock2 registry folders and sub folders.
This issue has notably been on Windows 8.1 Enterprise and not Windows 8 Enterprise. I have not tested it on other operating systems. I have been able to replicate this issue on on several (at least 8) computers. While the internet was not working, the computer still was able to obtain a valid IP address and get assigned a dns server. I was able to ping websites by name but browsers would indicate no internet connectivity. Doing a winsock reset in cmd.exe and a long list of other commands as well as several programs such as FRST and others were of no help.
Here is a list of the registry keys that were deleted by running adwcleaner, and restoring these keys, the internet connectivy issue that we saw was corrected. I did not go though all of them to find out specifically which one was breaking the internet.
The list can be viewed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxG0eJxl5S_JbWxqd0dSUHZfUVE/view?usp=sharing since posting them took up too many characters.
Please let me know if you need any more information or if I can help further.
